The most studied patient in medical history has died.

"Nobody Cares About You." That's my favorite part of the remarkable "Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students" by Prof. Stephen Stearns of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology:

"In fact, some professors care about you and some don't. Most probably do, but all are busy, which means in practice they cannot care about you because they don't have the time. You are on your own, and you had better get used to it."

Written thirty years ago, and somehow both lengthy and concise, it's a straightforward prescription for negotiating grad school in a way that maximizes your intellectual development. Highly recommended.

Pantheon was upgraded last week, and your quota was doubled. You now have 1 GB of free, networked storage space.

Bitesize Bio has a great post on two professional networking sites: LinkedIn, which is for all professions, and LabRoots, which is specifically for scientists.

The final fall session of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays will focus on the use of RSS feeds for pedagogical purposes. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a protocol that lets users subscribe to online content using an RSS “reader” or “aggregator”. Rather than checking 20 or 50 or 100 blogs every day, RSS feeds allow you to receive regular updates from your favorite information sources on the web. Aggregating and culling information from the web in this manner is pedagogically relevant for a wide range of courses and disciplines. RSS provides an efficient way for students to keep in touch with faculty, stay informed about coursework and other academic activities, and follow developments in their fields of study.

Robin Ladouceur will introduce RSS feeds and give an overview of RSS feed readers and aggregators, and then Barbara Stuart will present her use of RSS Feeds in her English 114 course this fall on the Election.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Bass Library, L01  

The final session of the Fall 2008 GIS Workshop Series will take place on Thursday, December 4, and the topic will be "Introduction to GIS Mapping and ESRI's ArcGIS Software." This workshop is an introduction to the basic concepts of creating, managing, and analyzing explicitly spatial data within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) framework and includes a step-by-step, "hands on" introduction to using spatial data within ESRI's ArcGIS software. Topics include spatial data models, spatial relationships, the ArcMap user interface, thematic mapping using symbology, and simple analysis using complex selection methods.

Thursday, December 4, 2008
1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Bass L06
Register here

Seed has an interview with Garrett Lisi, a theoretical physicist who does his work on his own terms.

The Center for Social Media at American University has put online a copyright guide called The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in Media Literacy Education.

Hat tip: Ars Technica

A brief report in Science shows that plastic test tubes and pipette tips can mess up lab measurements.

Hat tip: Seed

Seed has a summary of science bloggers' reactions to Obama's victory.

New technologies seem to be coming out every day, but which of these will we be using on campus a few years from now? The next edition of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays will try to help you get a handle on this question. It will feature Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education and a nationally recognized figure in the field of Educational Technology. Bryan serves on the advisory committee of the Horizon Project, which reports on trends in the use of technology in higher education in its annual Horizon Report . Don't miss this unique opportunity to meet with one of the leading thinkers on contemporary teaching and scholarship. 

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Bass Library, L01 

Stacey Maples of the Map Collection will host another session of his popular workshop "Introduction to GIS Mapping and ESRI's ArcGIS Software" on Wednesday, November 12, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., in the Bass Library, room L06, and there are still a few seats available. This workshop is an introduction to the basic concepts of creating, managing, and analyzing explicitly spatial data within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) framework and includes a step-by-step, "hands on" introduction to using spatial data within ESRI's ArcGIS software. Topics include spatial data models, spatial relationships, the ArcMap user interface, thematic mapping using symbology, and simple analysis using complex selection methods. Register here.

Yale has purchased a site license for the data analysis and graphing software Origin, and it is available now from the software library. The cost is $25.00 for an individual license, $125.00 for a lab license, and $750.00 for a departmental license. The purchase of Origin 8 provides a perpetual license so it need not be renewed, but version upgrades must be purchased through the software library as they are released. Origin is available only to faculty and staff and is Windows only.

There's a post over at Bitesize Bio about some applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch that just might turn those sleek gizmos into tools for your research. These apps let you view protein structures, do calculations for preparing solutions, and search the literature.

This week's workshop at StatLab will be an introduction to practical Perl and Python scripting. Perl and Python are very useful for collecting data from websites, "Screen Scraping", transforming large datasets methodically, and searching for regular patterns in data. Some basic programming experience expected.

Friday, October 24, 2008
3:00 to 4:30 p.m.
124 Prospect Street, Basement

This week at Teaching with Technology Tuesdays, Themba Flowers, manager in the Educational Technology Group, will discuss using TabletPCs to annotate lecture notes and increase student participation while eliminating undesired competition for attention from email and web-browsing.

The basis for this talk will be a Yale Economics class taught by Professor Donald Brown, Philip R Allen Professor of Economics. We will go over how classroom management software along with the interactivity of the TabletPC provides an opportunity, as Professor Brown put it, “to send all of the students to the blackboard at the same time.”

This session will showcase the Collaborative Learning Center’s recently purchased TabletPCs and collaborative software.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Bass Library, L01

A recent letter in Science quantifies the drop in R01 funding rates since 2000. The success rate of new grants submitted for the first time has declined from 20% to 7%, and the success rate of having a grant renewed on the first try has gone from 53% to 25%.

Hat tips: BitesizeBio and Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship

I'm sure you heard that earlier this month the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists for their work with green fluorescent protein. What you might not have heard is that the scientist who isolated the gene and gave it to two of the prize recipients, Douglas Prasher, lost his funding at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, moved to a job with the US Department of Agriculture, then with a NASA contractor, where his project was cut. He now drives a shuttlebus for a car dealership. Details here at NPR.

The main thing that I try to do with this blog is inform you about things at Yale--facilities, events, people--that can help with your research. On top of that, I sometimes try to tell you about things happening outside Yale that can affect research. My source for most of this information is a fantastic blog called Bitesize Bio, which is the work of Nick Oswald and Dan Rhoads. They've recently redesigned the site and given it a great new look, and it serves, at least for me, as a gateway to lots of other blogs. Sometimes they even have some pretty entertaining stuff, like dancing scientists. Subscribing with your feedreader is highly recommended!

When I meet with faculty to discuss how they use IT in their research, we sometimes discuss using images and video, and inevitably the conversation rolls around to copyright. Last week's TTT session was all about copyright, with Scott Matheson from the Library and Howard Barnaby from the Center for Language Study providing the expertise and leading the discussion. I'll repeat a few key points below, leaving out all the details, qualifications, and caveats. For the full story please consult the web pages for Electronic Library Initiatives and the Center for Language Study.

A work is most likely not copyrighted if any of these conditions are met:

1. It was created before 1923.
2. It was created before 1978 and does not have a copyright notice.
3. It was created by an employee of the US government.
4. It consists only of facts or raw data.
5. The creator died at least 70 years ago, or, if the work is by a corporation, it was published at least 95 years ago.

You can infringe a copyright under certain "fair use" conditions, which include four factors:

1. The purpose and context of your use of the work.
2. The nature of the work.
3. How much of the work you copy.
4. The impact of the infringement on the market for the work.

Whether an infringement is fair use is always a judgment call. Copyright circular #2 (pdf) over at the Electronic Library Initiatives has some great examples of how the fair use conditions might apply in several situations.

Finally, the Center for Language Study lists Eight Myths About Copyright. (Note that these are myths. That means that they're NOT TRUE.):

1. It is difficult to get a copyright.
2. Copyright does not concern me as an educator.
3. I can always copy a work that does not have a copyright notice.
4. I can never copy a work with a copyright notice.
5. I can copy as long as I give credit to the author or copyright owner.
6. I can copy a copyrighted work as long as it is not for commercial purposes.
7. I can make copies of copyrighted work available to students as long as access is password protected.
8. Educators never get sued for copyright infringement.

And once again, don't forget, this is just a quick summary, and I am definitely not an attorney.