Happy New Year from everyone at Team Mendeley! We’re excited to be back from the holidays and buzzing with ideas. We’ve got a couple of newsworthy bits, but that’s for another post.

This one is about a research proposal we submitted in December, trying to get selected by the Research Information Network for a commissioned study on the “Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers” (Mendeley, anyone?). It was a joint effort with Gavin Baker/SPARC, Jonathan Gray/Open Knowledge Foundation, Niall Haslam/European Molecular Biology Lab, Liz Lyon/UKOLN and Cameron Neylon/Science and Technology Facilities Council. As the lone social scientist on the team, my main task would have been to oversee the empirical survey and conduct the statistical analysis and structural equation modelling.

Unfortunately for us, even though we were invited into the final round of presentations at RIN, our bid did not get selected. I can understand (and agree with) the reasoning that RIN gave us - they thought we had a great team and compelling methodology, but we hadn’t given as much thought to the nuts and bolts of the project management as they would have liked. Nonetheless, it was a great learning experience (Gavin has blogged about this, too), and I genuinely enjoyed working out the proposal with the other team members. Getting into the final round wasn’t too shabby either, considering that none of us had ever written a proposal for such a research tender.

Sincere congratulations to the winning team from NCeSS/University of Manchester and ISSTI/University of Edinburgh!

In the spirit of Web 2.0 collaboration and sharing, our team had planned to make our proposal (and had we been selected, our ongoing work and raw data) public for everyone to access and re-use. So here’s the proposal we submitted:

Tender: Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers

As a recent member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, I’m marveling at their events calendar which strikes me as hands down the best entertainment programme in London (if you’re into scientific talks, that is). Two of the four lectures I’ll be attending in the coming weeks are part of the members-only, black-tie “Friday Evening Discourses” that were started by Michael Faraday in 1826 - isn’t that amazing?

One of the talks that I’ll unfortunately have to miss (because I’m travelling to Germany) is this one next Monday, 20th October:

Murder in Mayfair

London is an epicentre of medical advancement, from Edward Jenner’s pioneering work on vaccination to the world’s first heart and lung transplant. But London is also a hotbed of disease and demise and this event will take a look at the notorious murders and strange deaths in the capital. [...].

London has a rich and gruesome history of untimely demises. From the recent past we have the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, only a few minutes’ walk from the Royal Institution, who was killed by a radioactive teapot. 18 years earlier, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was dispatched with a poison tipped umbrella by Waterloo Bridge.

Or how about this one on 4th November:

The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy

Gray’s Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its rigorously scientific text, and masterful illustrations as beautiful as they are detailed. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy tells the story of the creation of this remarkable book, and the individuals who made it happen.

Wonderful, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of peppering this blog with Edo period, medieval, and Japanese monster anatomy, here are some more highly rigorous anatomic drawings I just came across:

Via Gizmodo.

One of the people I admire the most is James Nachtwey, ever since seeing “War Photographer“, the documentary about him. I have watched it four or five times by now, and each time I’m deeply moved both by his photographs and his refusal to become cynical despite the atrocities and suffering he has witnessed.

“Reticent about discussing his own life beyond the basic facts, he’s clearly one of those rare characters who focus singularly on their work with a missionary-like sense of purpose.”
- Salon.com

In 2007, he was the recipient of the TED Prize, which grants $100,000 and “one wish to change the world”:

His wish was for TED to help him “share a vital story with the world”. The story he chose to cover is the growing epidemic of an extremely drug resistant strain of tubercolosis. His pictures have just now been posted on TED:

You can help by visiting XDRTB.org, signing the petition, and spreading the word. There is no donation link on the XDRTB site, but on Action.org. If you’re a microbiologist, perhaps you can do even more!

My jetlag is in full swing as I’m writing this from my room at the lovely Walper Terrace Hotel in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. The local time is 10pm, but my inner clock (still set to GMT) tells me it’s 3 in the morning, thus lending incredible appeal to the hotel bed behind me. But I’ve decided to grim up and write about the conferences and workshops I’ve been attending in the past week, because everything whizzes by so fast that the backlog of blogworthy events is just getting bigger and bigger.

So, to start off, I participated in the Science Blogging 2008 Conference that was held on the 30th of August at the Royal Institution in London. More on that later; the conference was preceded by a “London Science Tour” on the 29th of August, led by Matt Brown, Editor at Nature Networks, writer for The Londonist and genuinely nice guy. Matt took us (a group of science bloggers + me) on a day’s walk to a number of scientific points of interest, exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and behind-the-scenes tours the Linnean Society of London, and the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. I could sit here all night enthusing about the incredible wonders nature on display there, but I’ll just say that - if you get the chance - you should see it for yourself. Here are some of the pictures I took:

Wellcome Collection - Malaria info booth

Wellcome Collection - Creepy crawlies that spread diseases

Linnean Society - Butterfly specimens collected almost 240 years ago

Linnean Society - Coleoptera of 1772, pleased to meet you

Linnean Society - 17th century books on horticulture

Darwin Centre - 8.6m squid “Archie” (Architeuthis dux)

Darwin Centre - A “really big-headed fish in a tube” (excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre - A “really poor, cute beaked guy in a glass” (belonging to the Tachyglossidae family? Excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre - Snake specimens

During the walk, I got to know some very nice people such as Heather Etchevers, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Martin Fenner (who by now has posted an interview with me on his blog), and Mo Costandi, author of the brilliant Neurophilosophy blog.

The funniest moment came later that night at a pub in Soho. Mo had just introduced me to some guy named Vaughan, and we were standing there with a pint of beer, talking about this and that. Up to that point, I had only exchanged about two sentences with Vaughan, and instead had started telling Mo about how my favourite neuroscience/psychology blog was Mind Hacks and how great Mind Hacks was - and Mo pointed over to Vaughan and said: “That’s Vaughan’s blog!”.

So I got to know the author of Mind Hacks by accident, which was completely awesome. As it turned out the next day, someone else shared my feelings. Ben Goldacre, famous Guardian Science Blogger, told a similar story about meeting Vaughan at the pub that night (”No way, you’re the author of Mind Hacks?! I LOVE Mind Hacks!”) during his opening keynote speech at the conference.

Well, so much for my plan to write about Science Blogging 2008, the Southampton Open Science Workshop, which I attended subsequently, and the Science in the 21st Century Conference, where I am now, in one go. It’s already 4.32am on my inner clock now, and I can’t resist the bed any longer. I guess this will be a multi-part post…

I thought I only had a little cold - that’s why, instead of resting and going to bed early, I had to prance around in the rain late at night for our Ikeodyssey. When my cough didn’t get better until yesterday and my voice started to disappear, I went to the NHS walk-in clinic in Soho. They had a staff shortage and a waiting room full of coughing people, so I neatly fit in.

After two hours, I was able to see a doctor, who in turn told me that I have a viral infection in my throat. Medicine and antibiotics won’t help, so I’ll have to rest, drink lots of fluid, and not talk for a few days. Good thing I can type rather quickly.

As I’m typing this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table, about to finish my second litre of peppermint tea laced with honey. And I just came across the funniest account of an experiment ever. It’s titled “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass“, by Lucas Kovar:

Now, let’s look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don’t. I see a bunch of crap.

Christ, this was such a waste of my time.

Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.

Reading it made me laugh (and cough) hard. Ah, the joy and wonder of science.

Via Worst. Result. Ever.

My favourite neuroscience/psychology blog Mind Hacks ran a wonderful quote by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert (whose TED talk I linked to earlier). The quote echoes one of the themes of my Ph.D. thesis (trying to account for the effects of emotions on decision making) and illustrates what has always drawn me to social psychology: Its balanced all-around view incorporating cognition, emotion, neurobiology and social influences.

So here goes:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

Amen, brother! Via Mind Hacks.

Last week, I mentioned an idea that Michael, Felix and I had discussed a while ago: The Journal of Failed Studies. We felt that this journal was to have a bright and shining future… if we ever got around to launching it.

Then Prof. Duchier kindly pointed me to The Journal of Interesting Negative Results, which in turn linked to The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. Especially the latter contains a number of fascinating articles on my favourite research subjects: Mood and subliminal influences on decision-making… all refusing to show a significant effect, unfortunately.

And so it appears that The Journal of Failed Studies already exists in several academic disciplines. Admittedly, they all found nicer ways of saying “fail”, too. To paraphrase Thomas Alva Edison: “My study hasn’t failed. I have just found 1000 ways of supporting the null hypothesis!”

A few days ago, there was an interesting story in the NY Times about new curriculum at Binghamton University which will try to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities. I meant to write about it on this blog, but didn’t find the time. Now I’ve read a reply which perfectly and concisely expresses my thoughts. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist at Duke University and co-author of The Intersection on ScienceBlogs:

Experience has taught me neither field can be addressed comprehensively through a single lens, and we make the greatest strides and forge new directions through the convergence of people and philosophies.

I couldn’t agree more, although getting there took me some time. When I began writing my Ph.D. thesis, I shared the office with Daniela Wentz, a doctoral student in Media Philosophy. I think she’d admit that, being relative novices in our fields, both of us were rather cocky about the perceived superiority of “our” epistemological position. I had just read Popper (and some Lakatos) and thought that only quantitative empirical research deserved to be called “science”, whereas she felt that deconstruction in the vein of Derrida was the be-all and end-all theory of knowledge.

We quickly became very good friends. As we spent countless hours debating the pros and cons and whys and whynots of our respective philosophical approaches, both in the office and over glasses of red wine in the cafés of Weimar (Humanities scholars know how to debate in style, you have to give them that), the respect for the other’s methods of scientific inquiry grew. I believe that my understanding and appreciation of science benefited immensely from these discussions. So if you’re an empirical researcher who doubts the epistemological value of the Humanities, that’s really something I can recommend: Find a friend in the Humanities to fight with!

One final thought about linguistic implications: In my native language German, the word “Wissenschaft” - as the literal translation of “sciences” - does encompass both the sciences and the humanities in its meaning.

We had a very distinguished visitor at our office yesterday! Prof. Bill Fitzgerald, who heads the Signal Processing Lab at the University of Cambridge, dropped by. For me, that’s one of the nicest things about working for Mendeley - we get to meet brilliant people who do research on the most fascinating of topics.

Bill, for instance, applies his data modelling expertise to a wide range of fields, from audio processing (e.g. automatically transcribing a piece of music to musical notation) to medical imaging and the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Later, during our lunch at Sapori (an Italian restaurant around the corner), he briefly spoke about his PhD research on the statistical properties of quantum mechanics. This prompted Mike to tell a Heisenberg joke I didn’t know yet: Heisenberg is speeding down the highway. A traffic cop pulls him over and asks: “Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?”. Heisenberg: “No, but I know exactly where I am!”

Yet, since Bill has been one of our earliest beta testers, we mainly spoke about his and our ideas on how to improve Mendeley and in which direction to take it. Such discussions are extremely valuable to us, so if you have any suggestions, requests, or ideas, please always feel free to contact us!

I just visited the Scientific American to see whether they had picked up this Physicsworld story on an allegedly successful cold fusion experiment in Japan. It seems they didn’t, and so my premature hopes of seeing the world’s energy problems solved before I left the office today took a little dent.

Instead, SciAm’s front page featured a story on the therapeutic value of blogging:

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Therapeutic value notwithstanding, I’ll stop blogging for now and head over to the Freemasons Arms pub in Hampstead for dinner and a cold beer with Drs. Hennig-Thurau and Wiertz.