Frank's Pandora
Archive for June, 2006
Digg it?
“Digg to allow users to vote for many types of news“, Reuters wrote yesterday. The hype that is Digg.com has reached a new height now that one of the most popular news recommendation sites will present version 3.0 on Monday. Reuters writes: The upgraded Digg.com, due out on Monday, threatens to further disrupt a professional [...]
Open peer review
The journal Nature is undertaking a bold new step in the process of peer review of the articles submitted to the journal by hopeful scientists. For the next three months, Nature is offering authors the choice to submit their paper to an open preprint server where everyone and anyone who bothers to register with Nature [...]
Familial apathy
A family is like a life-long mirror. You see yourself reflected in your parents, your siblings, your sibling’s children. Family traits tend to surface every now and then on family gatherings, and you suddenly see a trait you never realised you had. Reflected, and in your face, right there in the mirror. This happened to [...]
Death from chronic fatigue syndrom
Now that’s what I call being dead tired… First official death from chronic fatigue syndromeChronic fatigue is often dismissed as being all in the mind, but now the death of a 32-year-old woman in Britain has been officially attributed to the disease.
Original thought
An original thought is created not by asking a lot of questions, but by having a lot of answers and being equally right and wrong. – Frank Nuijens
To debrief or not to debrief
It’s a situation one never hopes to encounter: the situation where you witness someone’s death. Some 200 metres from my office, in the early and sunny morning, a woman was killed in a truck versus cyclist accident. I did not witness the accident myself, but several passers-by and – of course – the truck driver [...]
Nano heroes
Communicating to a lay audience can be hard enough. Especially when they are journalists who don’t have any scientific training. But some scientists have the ability to be both brilliant at their scientific craft and also to be able to communicate about it in a clear and intelligible fashion. Today I gave two journalists from [...]
Science Idol contest
Although the practise of attemtping to control and distort the science of political issues is commonplace in many governments, the Bush administration has a reputation for raising this art to perfection. Therefore, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which campaigns on environmental, health and military issues, has announced the Science Idol contest. They invite amateur [...]
Dark day for internet neutrality
Everybody’s internet will soon be the rich people’s internet, thanks to an unequivocally unintelligent vote in the US House of Representatives that opens the doors for “toll lanes on the information superhighway”, according to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. The majority of US politicians have, yet again, interpreted equal rights as equal rights for the [...]
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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