Here’s an innovative way of putting biomedicine on display:
As Vanessa (Street Anatomy) says,
the menstrual cycle has never looked so exciting! [...] Perfect for explaining the menstrual cycle for the first time to a young girl … or to a 26-year-old. I had no idea I went through a luteal lunacy!
Created by I Heart Guts!, “the brainchild of an anatomically obsessed illustrator who loves internal organs and all they do”.
Maybe the next generation of the classic biochemical pathways wall charts could learn a lesson or two — or better, I Heart Guts could make a version of:
(click here for a larger version)
Thomas L. Friedman notwithstanding, the world most definitely is not flat when it comes to “earth shaking” new consumer tech products like the iPhone or the Kindle e-book reader. I live in a Kindleless iPhone desert, and I resent it. Those are proprietary gadgets married to local telecommunications carriers, bound by local copyright laws and licensing agreements. They do not work in many / most countries outside the US. I can’t use iTunes, either:
“iTunes is licensed for reproduction of noncopyrighted materials or materials the user is legally permitted to reproduce. Purchases from the iTunes Store are available only in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States….”
Nor Pandora:
“Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.”
So I wasn’t surprised by the news that Amazon’s new “international Kindle” has crippled features and higher e-book prices than the US version.
“Newspapers and magazines delivered outside the US will not include photos and other images.”
This even applies to the UK-based newspapers Amazon has signed a deal with, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail The and Independent.
And that’s not the Kindle International’s only limitation. Amazon has also disabled its inbuilt web browser, returning the message that “Due to local restrictions, web browsing is not available for all countries”, when you try to access it.
There’s something Victorian and Colonialist about this. A bazillion-dollar giant like Amazon can’t get it’s act together to operate internationally? I can buy new books on Amazon.com (and pay pretty stiff shipping fees) — but not used books, which can only be sent to a US address. Bookdepository.com in England ships free of charge anywhere in the world.
Okay, e-books are more complicated, since they throw traditional publishing and distribution overboard, but that’s what we pay Amazon’s lawyers for, isn’t it – to figure this stuff out? To flatten the world in step with technology?
Since I can only read about e-books, because they raise so many interesting questions, and because I suspect that this is what museums are going to be publishing in the near future, I decided to put together a roundtable discussion on “More from Less: the e-Book Revolution and Mobile Evolution” at MCN 2009 in Portland, Oregon. If you think this is where we’re going, or if you disagree, join us. Bring your Kindles (I’m dying to actually see one…), Sony e-book readers, e-book-apped iPhones, and opinions.
UPDATE:
Things move so fast in this area, it’s dizzying. Two minutes after posting the above, I saw news that Amazon is releasing a Kindle-for-the-PC application. No e-book reader needed: now that’s an interesting twist from the purveyor of the leading e-book device. Does this hint at Amazon’s intention to phase out the device and start dealing in netbooks?
Let’s see if the PC application will be available internationally (I’ve signed up, and am waiting for the “not available in your country” notice.) n.b. Also not available for Mac, nor for Linux (n.b.b. the Kindle is Linux based). And it won’t deliver magazines or newspapers. Hello?
Share:I’ve been using Windows 7 for a month or so now and it’s top notch. Having said that, I wasn’t a Vista nay-sayer in the first place. Our home page is currently dedicated to the release (not sure I’m down with the stream of anonymous Twitter ‘reviews’ streaming there, but then, Bing’s Twitter search is so useful with the list of top links from tweets about windows 7).
I’m very happy about this:
but if that is not your thing, could I tempt you with a bit of PeepShow (in which Johnson recommends Vista). Of course, BlogPulse has the stats on the past 10 hours of blogging on Windows 7:
My iPhone envy just reached new heights. For any of you in iPhone enabled countries (ahem!) who like gadgets for gadgets, have a look at this article about iPhone apps for photographers. It even mentions my old favorite, the level app.
http://www.creativepro.com/article/iphone-apps-photographers
Share:When I was working at the Medical Museion as a docent, I often introduced visitors to our fabulous pharmacy. Here the visitors are introduced to such interesting objects as a jar containing moss from a human skull and a container for leeches. Leeches were used to draw blood from patients to restore their blood balance. The theoretical basis for this procedure was of course humoral pathology.
The use of animals is not something that is restricted to pharmacies in medical museums like ours. Animals are also used in biomedicine today. I’ll get back to that.
One of the advantages of being a museum docent is that one gets an opportunity to see the facial expression of visitors when they listen to stories like the one about the leeches. It’s interesting but hard to describe. It’s like if they had just chewed on a piece of lemon — actually a quite common emotional reaction.
The reason why I came to think about this is because a year or so ago one of our visitors claimed that maggots are being used today to clean infected wounds, a procedure I realised is known as biosurgery. Googling ‘biosurgery’ I found out that it stands for a variety of different procedures, but one is actually the medical procedure of cleaning wounds. As usual one can find a YouTube video of the procedure being executed. Take a look here:
I’m quite sure my own facial expression was the exactly same as our visitor expressed when I told them about the use of leeches :)
While searching for more info on biosurgery I also stumbled upon this article where I found this great quote:
Despite its effectiveness, maggot therapy — or biosurgery to the squeamish — must overcome the “yuck factor” with physicians to gain widespread acceptance. “In my experience, patients are very trusting. The ‘yuck factor’ is with practitioners,” Ms. Jones said. Internal Medicine News, 1 Feb. 2005
The ‘yuck factor’ seems to be an accurate description, which I guess can also be applied to other biomedical procedures.
One thing that I was unable to discover was how often maggot therapy/biosurgery as a technique is used around the world. Does anybody know?
I just noticed a new feature on BlogPulse – graphs of posts over the course of a day.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be working right now, but here’s a capture of what the Bing/Google Twitter break looked like:
Readers of this blog will have figured out that I’m swamped with shipping something right now. I just wanted to resurface and point enthusiastically to Bing’s launch of a Twitter search vertical. There are basically 3 features in this vertical: search results which show matching tweets, the tag cloud of hot topics (similar to what Twitter already has) and the list of top links from tweets that include a term – a sort of auto-digg driven by Twitter data.
The first two are required but to me not especially interesting. The third is really what I think the basics of real time search are all about – except that I would call it attention search: searching what people are paying attention to.
At any rate, I think the significance of Bing producing something like this is important. In addition, it has been produced in a manner that perfectly fits the data. Pushing out of the standard search experience to deliver something that is driven by the data model is a direction that Microsoft is clearly making with all things Bing. This should be contrasted with Google’s hot-on-the-heels announcement of their Twitter integration:
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
If the implications of this are that the Twitter data will be somehow blended into the SERP then Google is being a slave to its simplicity at the expense of leveraging the nature of the data. We’ll see when it surfaces. TechCrunch also points to this, although with what look like different expectations:
It’s worth noting that while Bing’s Twitter search is live today, it sounds like Google will be working Twitter’s data into its search results over the next few months.
It is also interesting to take a look at the media reaction. Search Engine Land gives a reasonably comprehensive overview. Techmeme is currently showing Bing getting a lot more attention on this (with a real product) compared to Google (with no real product). Of course, the real issue of attention is: how are Google, Apple, etc. going to rain on our parade tomorrow…
Technically Personal posted a very useful list of 15 Stunning Augmented Reality Apps for the iPhone. This includes Layar which is now available for the iPhone (see image above.) These AR apps make it possible to start developing AR games.
Thanks to Sean for this.
One of the reasons that I post so seldom here is that oft-noticed problem of being over-extended. If you are going to MCN 2009 in Portland next month (and I hope you are), you’ll notice that I am involved in workshops on Cloud Computing, and a very special project of mine, “Project Management.”
But, not even MCN has been the real focus of my alleged copious spare time. I’m going to be co-teaching a class in “Web Publishing and Content” this spring for Brandeis University’s Graduate Professional Studies. We have had a lot of fun trying to figure out the content for the classes, such that we can cover everything from IP on the web to metadata and findability to what a CMS looks like and how you build it, and on to social media (your CMS as hosted by the rest of the world).
It is a lot of fun trying to encapsulate what I know, pared down to, “enough for a student to absorb so that he or she can dig more deeply if inspired; and won’t be blindslided by something critical if that’s as far as they go”. It is also depressing to see how few useful books or web resources are available on the subject. I intend for us to help fix the lack of web resources as we get happy with some of our class notes and can make them public without fearing total embarrassment. With luck, people will read some of them and suggest improvements, even. What a concept.
The last book with “Content Management System” in its title was published five years ago? seven years ago? All of the ones we’ve gone through still think of concepts like “FTP” as relevant. If you are not a systems administrator, or an aging geek, I would suggest that not only don’t you know the term, you don’t know that when we say that, we really mean “oh, you would never use FTP today–that would mean sending a password in clear text–you’d use FTP over SSH, or SFTP”. But you don’t have to know that because when you upload files to a current CMS, be it something simple like Blogger, or something much more complex like Sharepoint or Alfresco or Drupal or Vignette you aren’t going to use any explicit protocol. You’ll either drag and drop your files, and some application behind the scenes will use WebDAV or something similar to move copies from your computer to the CMS; or you’ll use one of those familiar “browse” boxes to locate your file(s) and then some behind the scenes script will ensure that your “stuff” got uploaded.
This is a good thing. When we can teach “Content Management” instead of “database-backed websites” we’re really saying that we have designed systems smart enough so that users can focus on what they really want to do–get a website up, or manage their digital assets, or their collections–without getting distracting by the clunky-seeming tools we used to build much of that infrastructure. So, I still use SFTP most days as I build new tools, or set up new pieces of our CMS puzzle. But the people who specify how those systems should work, or who actually manage our content? They know all about what they write about. They know about writing for the web (hopefully) and how to tweet. They know what metadata needs to be captured so that next year we know where the original TIFF is stored whence came this year’s JPEG–and what rights we have to repurpose it, and so we know who has used it where so far, and how many people have viewed it. That’s some of what managing content and web publishing is all about, and we’re really going to have fun writing a course that addresses the subject instead of trying to teach people how to build one out of bits and bytes, ftp-ing unmanaged files that will forever sit somewhere with no CMS to say whether they are needed any more.
In our course, we’ll focus on Findability, and Multimedia, and Writing for the Web, and even Web 2.0–the stuff that really matters for Content Management in the 21st century.
I think that this class, and the way we are approaching the subject, illuminate the difference between techies–our inner (sometimes outer) geek–the person who is more interested in how something was done than in what actually needs to be done–and our non-techie sides–the place where most of us get our actual work done.
One day I’ll even be done writing the notes–hopefully, before class starts.
Share:THE latest issue of Technology Review contains a photo essay by yours truly, called Time Travel Through the Brain, in which I look at how techniques used to investigate the brain have evolved during the 100 year history of modern neuroscience. The essay begins with a drawing by the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who used the staining method discovered by Camillo Golgi to establish that nervous tissue is composed of cells, then goes on to describe more recent methods such as fibre tracing, Brainbow and various types of microscopy.
This image from the piece graced the cover of the Journal of Neuroscience back in April. It's a rotary shadow electron micrograph showing the cytoskeleton of a hippocampal neuron, by Bernd Knöll of the University of Tübingen and Jürgen Berger and Heinz Schwarz of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. The technique involves freezing the specimen under high pressure in liquid nitrogen, then fracturing it with a blade in an ultra-cooled vacuum chamber to strip off the membrane. During fracture, the specimen stage rotates; as it does so, platinum and carbon are deposited onto it from a pair of electrodes, to produce a metallic three-dimensional replica of the cell interior.
Read the comments on this post...I used to ask that question of my students in art history classes. Paul Gauguin was a famous painter, but by all accounts, a less-than-perfect husband. I’m not going to get into a debate here, nor did I then, about whether or not Mrs. G. might have been relieved when her husband abandoned her and their five children and then, eight years later, took off for Tahiti. The question remains at what point do we let our personal feelings or opinions about individuals influence our actions.
I was reminded of my rather naive question this morning when I ran across the following blog post: http://popularculturegaming.com/?p=106. In it the author asks the following question: “Is it acceptable to buy a game or other form of entertainment if you know that one of the people who created it holds views that you strongly disagree with?” Essentially it’s the same question I was asking my students and it’s a question that we all have to answer for ourselves–I do know there are a lot of books I would never have read if I limited myself to reading those who hold views that are similar to mine. Perhaps the key word in both my question and the blogger’s question is ”buy”–am I willing for someone who holds views that are reprehensible to me to profit via my actions?
What do you think?
Share:Richard Lewontin, on his friend Carl Sagan and how to think about pseudoscience, from a 1997 review of Sagan’s Demon Haunted World:
[Carl] Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience [debating creationists]. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge.
Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.
I am (finally) starting to think about my cranks book again.
Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science.
As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in the world today. Financial crisis, atomic weapon threats and global warming aside — the rapid technical development in biology and biomedicine raises some pretty hefty social, political and ethical questions which we, as a museum, can hardly avoid dealing with if we want to stay just minimally atuned to the world around us.
Take the issue of synthetic biology. Forget about the potentials benefits and risks of stem cell biology, nanotech, gene therapy, and so forth. Synthetic biology — the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature, for example, constructing living cells from simple molecules (proto-cells); creating new biological systems based on biochemical pathways not found in nature; etc — is potentially more powerful, not least for medical therapy and human enhancement.
Is it safe and secure? Well, of course it isn’t! In yesterday’s issue of Public Service Review: Science and Technology, Markus Schmidt, who leads the SYNBIOSAFE project at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management, raises some of the problems involved in the development of synthetic biology:
With the availability of genetic sequence information available on the internet and outsourcing of DNA synthesis to specialised synthesis companies, we are facing the risk that some person with malicious intents might place an order for pathogenic genes.
But there is always two sides to new technologies. In the future, more and more people will probably be able to construct new biological systems (read: democratic technology). Already, the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston invites students from all over the world to construct new biologies. And there are several DIY biotech groups who want to get the techne out of the laboratory, to bring it to the people. Such democratisation of synthetic biology might, as Schmidt rightly observes, lead to a creative revolution similar to that we have seen in the computer industry and the internet. Imagine synthbio 2.0 — love it or hate it.
Schmidt’s institute is only the last in a row of initiatives to discuss the safety and the political, governance and ethical issues involved in synthetic biology. Two years ago a report from the J. Craig Venter Institute discussed the governance problems associated with synthetic biology, and last year a report from the International Association of Synthetic Biology proposed a number of technical solutions for improved biosecurity. And there are several other initiatives around — enough to fill the agenda of a future-looking medical museum.
Schmidt’s analysis is expanded in M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra and H. de Vriend, eds., Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences (2009); there is also a 55 min video here: SYNBIOSAFE: Synthetic biology and its social and ethical implications.
THE humble fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has the ability to learn and remember, and to make predictions about the outcome of its behaviours on the basis of past experience. Compared to a human brain, that of the fruit fly is relatively simple, containing approximately 250,000 cells. Even so, little is known about the anatomical basis of memory formation. The neural circuitry underlying memories in these insects has now been dissected. In an elegant new study published in the journal Cell, researchers from the University of Oxford show that aversive memories are dependent on a tiny cluster of neurons, and also demonstrate that such memories can be implanted in the fruit fly's brain by using light to manipulate the cells' activity.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...The material dimension of science is back in focus for historians. As far back as I remember, it was historians of technology who were the ‘materialists’, whereas historians of science were ‘idealists’. Didn’t really matter what kind of studies they did — historians of science have always tended to be intererested in mind (theories, ideas, concepts, discourses, etc.), whereas historians of technology have given higher priority to matter — material matter, not just conceptualised matter.
But historians of science are about to discover the material aspects of science. Next summer’s workshop ‘Scientific Objects and their Materiality in the History of Chemistry’ is a case in point. Organised by Michael Gordin (Princeton), Ursula Klein( Berlin), and Carsten Reinhardt (Bielefeld) and held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 24-26 June 2010, it will explore the materiality of scientific objects with a focus on the history of chemistry:
For both experimental inquiry and technical application, the sciences depend on working with material things and processes. In this respect, chemistry is arguably the material science par excellence, primarily through the crucial role of the synthesis of chemical compounds, and the strong interactions with technological institutions and industry. In terms of the representation of its objects of inquiry, chemistry has a peculiarly materialized semiology in a long-standing tradition of graphic formulae and three-dimensional structural models, as well as a rich heritage of ordering systems such as the periodic table. In the middle-ground between representation and intervention there stand certain kinds of principles and entities, some of them invisible, that are both objects of experimental inquiry and theoretical speculation. Concepts such as the atom, element, or phlogiston have laid the groundwork for chemical research in defining the units of ordering systems, constituting the goals for material production, serving as limitations to the extent of chemical practice, or having crucial heuristic roles. And all of them have experienced variation, re-definition, development, suppression, and sometimes even extinction in the course of history.
And they tacitly refer to the notion of ‘mangling of practice’:
Commonly, the materiality of scientific objects has been described by two, arguably conflicting, dimensions: First, by studies of materially-intervening practice—the ways in which ‘real things’ are involved in and condition such practice. Second, by the significance and meaning ascribed to things in discursive practice. These two dimensions are not necessarily in contradiction, and their tension can be used in productive and innovative ways.
I hardly need to emphasise how important this kind of inqury is for museums of science, technology and medicine, because materiality is at the center of the museum enterprise.
The following concepts/objects are indicative of the organisers’ intentions:
• earth, air, water, fire, ether
• sal, mercur, sulfur
• phlogiston, caloric, oxygen, lumière
• element, compound, composition, mixture, alloy
• electron, atom, bond, molecule, structure
• polymer, colloid, crystal, glass
• salt, base, acid
• metal, halogen, rare earth
• gas, liquid, solid, plasma
• natural product, synthetic product
• supramolecular, nano
• pure, impure
• chemical reaction
The workshop will consist of ca. 15 precirculated papers. The want max 350 words proposals by 1 December, 2009. Write to Carsten Reinhardt: carsten.reinhardt@uni-bielefeld.de.
I’ll take my good news where ever I can dredge it up. This will do for today:
By AOIFE WHITE (AP)
BRUSSELS — The European Commission said Monday it may revise copyright law to make it easier for companies like Google Inc. to scan printed books and distribute digital copies over the Internet…
Under Europe’s current patchwork of copyright laws, rights are now managed separately in each of the European Union’s 27 nations, making it difficult to seek permission to republish or digitize content, especially when the rights holder is hard to find.
The European Commission said it would start work next year, with the goal of encouraging mass-scale digitization and suggesting ways for compensating copyright holders. Any suggested changes to European law would have to be approved by EU governments and lawmakers.
The commission said the move was partly triggered by a hearing it held in September where European authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies spoke out about how they would be affected by a deal Google is negotiating in the U.S.
Google has been scanning millions of books still under U.S. copyright. Under a tentative settlement with U.S. authors and publishers, that will cover all books unless the copyright holders object. A judge still needs to approve the settlement after the parties make changes to address U.S. Justice Department concerns. EU antitrust authorities are not examining it.
The real kick-in-the-pants is this:
The European Commission, the EU executive, said that deal would create a situation where “the vast number of European works in U.S. libraries that have been digitized by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the U.S. but not in Europe itself.”
Absurdities like this just might prompt the breaking down of copyright walls. Google in the role of Superman is nothing new, but always debatable. In this instance, Superman seems to be doing some good.
At MCN 2009 in Portland, Oregon, next month, Paula Holm Jensen will discuss the Google Book Settlement and how it affects us, not only as individuals but as museums. “More from Less: the e-Book Revolution and Mobile Evolution” will happen on Nov. 14. Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive and Cheryle Robertson from LACMA will round out the roundtable, so to speak, but you the audience will be an important part of the discussion.
All are welcome.
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