Community Biotech

I read an interesting book review today about technology and social structure, and of particular interest to me was the write up about community biotech labs and crowed sourced research. The book tells the story of a number of small tech start ups seeking to involve or enable the populace or local communities to participate or undertake their own biological research involving genetics. Biocurious is the featured community biotech lab which teaches people the basics of genetic research as well as providing a community of both enthusiasts and specialists and cheap accessible labs for people to experiment in, poke around their website and you can get a pretty good idea of their program. While Genomera is the featured crowd sourced research group, their web page is pretty uninformative, but what the hell, this shit is totally exciting. I look forward to participating in such research and seeing what interesting studies come from places such as these.

End of the world.

*South korea and Japan are waiting for whatever moment a nuclear war is unleashed by kim jong un. *"were waiting for the worst" confirm the authorities. *They might attack before or after the 10th of April. Also down the bottom: crazy woman eats the face of a girl.

microbiomes

I've been excited and hence fascinated by the rapid developments in microbiology over the past few years. Utilizing advanced genetic sequencing technology it is now possible to see and understand microbes and their ecology like never before, and this development has unimaginable potential to transform not just our understanding but also our approach to the world. I found this video today of Jessica Green, which reveals very nicely just some of the potentials of the field, and which also features an elegantly designed experiment. If your interested in reading more, check out the microbiome wikipedia page for more information.

Well, I was kinda of hoping for a front page with something different to coverage of the Korean tensions, you know a bit of diversity, but now i'm all for it, I think the Peruvian tabloids provide the best coverage. Today's headline "180, 000 deaths: attack with North Korean nuclear missiles on the island of Guam could provoke a tragedy without precedent".

Robots Al Ataque

continuing the Korean war thread....

Guerra Nuclear!

Peru has a wonderful assortment of sensational press, that almost daily manage to deliver a range of front covers ranging from the extreme to out of this world, over the coming weeks i'm going to share this daily extravaganza with you. But to start, a rather slow news day, Guerra Nuclear! stay tuned, there's more to come.

To hell with the publishers, bring on open access

So I don’t know if you’ve heard of open access or if you know much about the science publishing industry, but basically at present scientists are beholden to a vampiric bunch of arseholes which are the science publishing industry who care for naught but their bank balances and a whole bunch of people want to break this cartel with a thing called open access. Whoever wins this fight will have huge ramifications for the world so it’s kind of a big deal and you should probably know a bit about it.

First let me introduce the establishment, that is the publishing industry or vampires as I here refer to them. These are a bunch of “esteemed” journals which publish scientists work (which is most frequently publicly funded) at a hefty price to the scientists and then charge extremely exorbitant amounts of money to view the contents of the journals (see the price quoted to me in the picture above), which is other scientists work also funded by the public. So they charge money at both ends and give nothing to scientists other than a shared forum. Scientists are dependant upon sharing each other’s work, which means they have no option other than to deal with these nefarious fuckwits if they wish to achieve anything.

It gets richer though, scientists gain prestige depending on which journals accept their paper, the more expensive a journal to publish in and the more expensive to read, the more kudos you have for appearing in their catalogue. This prestige association is a neat trick, and in my view the one thing that stops a run on the entire publishing industry. Generally my senior colleagues I’ve talked to believe the publishing industry sucks, presents serious ethical dilemmas and contributes little financial benefit or otherwise to science(they merely publish, all the other work is undertaken by scientists at their own or institutions cost) but are worried how other scientists will know how cool they are without it.

If you’d like to hear the industries mealy mouthed explanation of why they are so valuable, go here, and if you’re interested in good explanation of why the publishing industry is a rort, follow this link.

Anyhow, a bunch of intelligent and talented individuals have created a concept known as open access, where published work is free to read, which means everyone has access to it, whether your rich or poor or have only a passing interest in science. This is nothing short of pure genius, because should they succeed, the world will be wiser for it. Scientists in the developing world will have access to research equal to their peers in the developed world, and anyone seeking to learn about a topic will have the opportunity to educate themselves, regardless of their educational background. This last point has the possibility of changing the public perception of and engagement with science and liberating many great minds to participate in the world of science.

 

The idea has substantial merit and therefore has had some significant wins of late. In Australia, the UK and the U.S., the governments have started to demand that people have access to the research they have funded, and therefore in various forms and guises demanded with legislation that new publically funded research should be published open access. NEW RESEARCH, not the significantly vaster troves that exist under lock and key, suggesting that governments don’t have the courage to truly stand up to this mafia and demand the return of our publically funded research.

Most recently, a famous programmer and online activist by the name of Aaron Swartz, attempted to liberate a swath of this literature into the public domain, the result of which was such a terrible prosecution by the U.S. government, that the anxiety associated with the court case led him to take his own life.

Though some good has come from the tormenting of Aaron Swartz to the point of suicide, and that is that many more people now know about the publishing rort and the enormous potential and therefore the importance of open access. If you truly hope for equality in the world then you should incorporate open access into your actions, hopes and dreams.