Websites of note

www.jove.com JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, publishes experiments through peer-reviewed scientific video articles. The editorial standards for text and video are high, as I discovered when I looked at the entry Niego, B., Medcalf, R. L. “Improved Method for the Preparation of a Human Cell-based, Contact Model of the Blood–Brain Barrier”. J. Vis. Exp. (81), e50934, doi:10.3791/50934 (2013). The citation format used is as recommended by the journal; Author, Title. Journal (Issue), Page, identifier (Year). The reason for the high quality of the video is that for most papers the journal provides a world-wide professional video team to record, edit, and add animations to each paper. The cost is offset by publication fees. The journal came to my attention when I was alerted that our library subscribes to the journal. The rationale for video is that JoVE will increase successful reproduction of experiments and assist in gaining new skills. There is a wide range of procedures categorized under the divisions of neuroscience, immunology and Infection, clinical and translational medicine, bioengineering, applied physics, chemistry, behavior, and environment. For teachers of laboratory courses there are numerous videos of advanced and routine laboratory procedures to draw upon. www.springeropen.com SpringerOpen began in June 2010 as Springer Publications portfolio of peer-reviewed open access journals across all areas of science. Looking at over 300 titles of the journals available shows a mixture of broad and narrow focus, ranging through all STEM subjects. Sadly few are directly related to molecular life science. The contributions are peer reviewed and authors pay for inclusion. However access is free and thereby available to an audience much greater than for subscription journals. SpringerOpen journals and books use the same peer review and editorial processes as subscription journals to ensure the quality and reliability of the work. Articles are cited in a way that closely reflects traditional citation. However, since articles are not printed, basing citation on page numbers is not appropriate. PDFs of these articles have numbered pages, but the numbers are not part of the citation. Instead articles are cited in the form Authors, Title, Journal name, year, volume number, article number. For example Li, Y. and Wingert, R.A. “Regenerative medicine for the kidney: stem cell prospects & challenges” Clinical and Translational Medicine 2013, 2:11. This paper is marked as highly accessed and notes the escalating crisis in nephrology as more patients suffer from kidney disease culminating in organ failure. A new journal inviting submissions at the time of visiting was Smart Learning Environments that will cover current technologies for teaching and learning. It will discuss need for reform, innovative uses of emerging pedagogical approaches, new technologies, and best practices. circos.ca Martin Krzywinski works in Vancouver Canada and I had the pleasure of attending a conference presentation in which he showed how his Circos data aggregation application could make enormous databases accessible, particularly genomes. The Circos website exudes much of the enthusiasm that the man himself portrays. Krzywinski asks “Have you noticed how beautifully everyday science and technology is rendered in movies?” Then he adds that “No busy scientist is able to make such great design and type face choices! The reality of cutting-edge science reveals a grimmer picture, replete with incomprehensible figures, illegible color combination, and awkward type faces.” Scientists should use tools that are useful, effective, and pretty. Other scientists will thank them, the press will thank them, as will the public and policy makers, who are ultimately asked to digest the results. The covers of both Nature and Science have featured art generated by Circos and the website has a gallery of published figures from many users; see Fig. 1. Circos uses a simple input data format, and allows for image customization. For genome visualization it can show changes in a genome over time, or differences between two or more genomes. It can show how cancer genomes differ from healthy ones. The talk by Krzywinski that I attended was at a teaching conference and not surprisingly the message was expanded to teachers to make their presentations more attractive and informative. www.promedmail.org The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED-mail) is a global emerging disease and outbreak reporting system. The SARS epidemic of 2003 demonstrated the emergence and spread of a novel infectious disease with the speed of intercontinental travel. ProMED-mail has more than 50,000 participants in over 185 countries and has pioneered the concept of online reporting of emerging disease and outbreak detection. There is an average of seven reports each day of infectious disease outbreaks with commentary from a staff of expert moderators. Some 70% of emerging human diseases originate in other animal species so ProMED-mail also reports on emerging animal diseases. Diseases of agriculturally important plants are also included because of their impact on human health. The site came to my attention at an education conference when it was adapted as a project for peer cooperation within a course in epidemiology. The report of that teaching experience can be read in the paper “Reality-based learning: Outbreak, an engaging introductory course in public health and epidemiology” published in Health Education Journal (2013) 72: 584–600. The authors (Danilla Grando and David Santandreu-Calonge) claim to have developed an effective team-based course with high student engagement and satisfaction. They also claim that their model could be used to effectively deliver other science-based courses online. sites.google.com/site/vibenet101/ VIBEnet (Vision and Innovation in Biology Education) is an Australian network of university biology teachers. The group is aiming to develop a set of Biology Threshold Learning Outcomes, also to mentor the next generation of Biology teachers and to create a vision and innovation statement about the direction of the biology curriculum. They have held national conferences, also incorporating school teachers, and some of the executive of the group are biochemists. Although the website had minimal material, when visited, you can find an aspirational list of Biology Threshold Learning Outcomes (graduate outcomes), articulating the key concepts and competencies of biology graduates. These are based on the science objectives developed by Brian Yates and Sue Jones for the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards project (find report at www.olt.gov.au/resource-library?text=LTAS+science). The VIBEnet objectives are listed under the headings understanding, knowledge, inquiry and problem solving and personal and professional responsibility. For example, one aspiration is to critically analyze observations of biological phenomena by creating and developing models, and proposing and testing hypotheses. Heart.org The American Heart Association was founded by six cardiologists in 1924 and now has more than 22 million volunteers and supporters with a permanent staff of 2,700 employees. The American Stroke Association was created as a division in 1997. The Heart Association provides CPR training and healthy lifestyle advice as well as treatment guidelines to healthcare professionals. They also lobby lawmakers for changes to protect and improve health. The homepage is rather busy with a changing banner of recent news and a separate Headlines section. There are four fixed panels that give access to the educational resources. They are warning signs, videos, guidelines resource center, and interactive library. At the time of visiting the guidelines for prescribing statins to control cholesterol had just been revised to recommend that more marginal patients be given statins. The introduction to the recommendations states “More than half of you will likely suffer a cardiac event. One in every three of you will die of cardiovascular disease. We don't share these statistics to alarm you. We share them to arm you. The new prevention guidelines for cardiovascular risk assessment and treatment are based on rigorous scientific reviews and provide significant tools so doctors can provide the best individualized care. For the first time in a major guideline, we focus on estimating risk for both heart attacks and strokes. The guidelines, also for the first time, provide estimates applicable to African-Americans, who face greater risks for heart disease and stroke than other groups.” The guidelines themselves are not written in accessible language and defy a simple summary, so you will need to sift through to find the take-home recommendations. www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html This site welcomes you to amaze your education colleagues by using this tool to write reports, grant applications, and other documents related to education. It produces finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense using code adapted from Dack.com's Web Economy BS Generator. The science geek who created this utility was inspired by statements from the College Board's Chemistry Framework that included “The student can connect phenomena and models across spatial and temporal scales.” Back in the 1950s I recall that the British comedy combination called the Goons set out to spoof the speeches of parliament. The Goons were defeated by reading real speeches and concluding that they were so content-free that no spoof could possibly do better than the real thing, although Peter Sellers did eventually pen a suitable spoof titled Party Political Speech (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxBtGuu9BVE). Some of our educational literature equals the vacuity that Sellers captured so well in his skit. Some samples follow from the jargon generator. We will advocate competency-based content with a laser-like focus. We will revisit revolutionary decision-making in authentic, real-world scenarios. We will operationalize group-based problem-solving across content areas. Over to you to generate more gems of baffling profundity either randomly or by selection from the lists of prepositional phrases, nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The nouns include one of my least favorite terms, scaffolding. www.badscience.net The circumstance that we can admire good science defines the existence of bad science. It is less obvious than we might suspect as to what published works deserve our praise and which our scorn and skepticism. Some science is inadvertently bad and some is deliberately fraudulent. Ben Goldacre mounts the Bad Science site and currently works as an academic in epidemiology. He was medically trained in Oxford and London. He has a parallel occupation providing speaking interludes on a fee for service basis and has authored books on fraudulent publication, notably about Bad Pharma and Bad Science. He specializes in the misuse of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, quacks, and drug companies. One of the interesting cases he covers is the Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University (www.badscience.net/2003/06/the-sokal-affair). In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies to test the journal's intellectual rigor. The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was in Sokal's words “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense structured around the silliest quotations about mathematics and physics.” Others have followed his example to test what can get published and sadly many hoaxers have found how easy it is to get published in the plethora of new online journals. Under About Ben Goldacre you will find a link to his TED talk in Edinburgh, a talk that is more than worthy of high rank among the many excellent presentations hosted by TED. There is a lot of bad science and a lot to browse here.

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