Online communities - are they the best way to get help and guidance for all life's issues?

I do often think that death and cancer are strange taboos given that so many of us are affected by them directly or indirectly.

A study published this week by Lorraine Buis and coworkers looked at online communities for cancer sufferers (see article here). Apparently cancer sufferers are increasingly being pointed in the direction of these communities to get information and emotional support. The aim was to see if there was a link between the survival rates for the cancer and what people tended to be talking about on the forum.

The results were as follows:

• Online support communities for high survival rate cancers are more orientated towards emotional support than forums for cancers with low survival rates.
  

• Support communities for low survival rate cancers contain more information than online support communities for high survival rate cancers.

The authors hope that this work can help the medical profession make informed decisions when recommending online communities. In this case the families of those who passed away are clearly going to have very different thoughts and priorities to survivors and their loved ones. They will therefore participate in communities in different ways and perhaps not always be providing what their fellow community members might need. I wonder how prevalent this type of discrepancy is in online forums in general?

Science and Truth

What I've been looking for recently are places to discuss the big issues in science and get them out to the world at large. In my post on CERN I challenged scientists to get their message across in simple and effective terms so as to avoid malicious rumours. David Weinkove is very experienced in these events and brings us a new and interesting format with his brother:

A Talkaoke at the Science Museum this Tuesday at 7 pm

In a recent Essay at LabLit.com he challenges scientists and non-scientists alike to

get off your pedestal and get round the table

It certainly sounds an interesting format, a type of interactive round table talkshow. I'm going to try and grab a ticket as there still seems to be places available.

It's free, at London's Dana centre in the Science Museum, you can find out more here and see the facebook page too.

Parley with a parochial perpetual perceptive popular poster!

Get that?

I have been answering some questions about why I write this thing.

You can look in wonderment at Sylwia Presley's blog to find out more. It's often an interesting site, this week covering the ethics around the US election as well as some great photos and blogging tips.

It's been great to take part through her series of blogger interviews. Other subjects have included Karl, Lolly, Colin, Rich, and the prodigies that are Kid tech Guru and Monik.

Sparrow's Spleen

JET set for an open evening

The UKAEA team, who were at the science event in Didcot emailed me with some dates for public open evenings at my local fusion experiment.

Sounds interesting! Looking back over the power plants I've visited since I was a kid, my CV reads like this:

• Nuclear
• Coal
• Hydro-Electric
• Tidal Barrage
• Wind
• Pumped Storage

I've also been to the centre for alternative energy in Wales and seen solar water heating and geothermal energy in use in France.

Fusion can be my next, hopefully ITER, the next big experiment will viably produce power!

Greenpeace on fusion: Whatever it is, we're against it

Last weekend was the hugely over-hyped Didcot First Science Event. There I got to see some fun science demonstrations and took away a CD-ROM about Fusion Power. There was also a board for everone to write their opinions on which I thought was good fun.

There was no community interaction on the internet though, this got me thinking about how all the academics need to get their message out better online as was the case for CERN.

Anyway, luckily my CD-ROM drive hadn't packed up from lack of use and I watched the animated slide-show from the guys over at the JET laboratory in Culham. It was reasonably interesting, for me, a trained scientist... I hope the other people who picked it up felt the same. I'd love to share it but I wouldn't want to get a rep for copyright infringement.

Later, I heard from Richard Kemp a fusion scientist, via my brother Stephen. They passed on this great link from theregister.co.uk in which Andrew Orlowski systematically castigates Greenpeace for their suspicion of Fusion Power. It's a powerful and amusing piece, with a great soundbite at the end.

Ranting is fun, and great names like Patrick Moore wouldn't have abandonned Greenpeace unless Orlowski had a point.

But how do we get the good news flowing about science?

The BBC turns Presidential Science Advisor

The interesting question asked by this programme was

"Will the next US president embrace science and solve the world's problems like Kenedy did to an extent... Or will we continue down the same track of mistrusting the scientific community and destoying ourselves with our creations."

I didn't manage to catch this programme in the first place, but somehow it is still available... Hopefully the BBC have realised that it's important that this show gets to a wide audience and will remain laissez faire about claiming copyright. Correction: video no longer available, wondered how long it would take.

"The monkeys' performance improved markedly with practice"

Hope of a cure for motor neurone problems today. You can read about the story on the Nature News site where I got the title from (with it's nice technorati backlinks widget) and also the BBC.

Moritz, C. T. , Perlmutter, S. I. & Fetz, E. E. have proved the concept of using signals from a monkey's brain to make it's own paralysed limb move.

I think that the discussion so far has managed expectations really well. Even Luboš Motl's cheeky mock-up of Stephen Hawking as Superman has provoked nothing but measured commentary.

Now let me see, how do I bet on future Nobel Prize winners...

What a great name!

...nice headline too!


You can check out the press release here and get the latest news from Henri Boffin's peers here at the Eurekalert service.

Wherever there is fun there's always... SCIENCE!

Scientists say Coke kills sperm and was one of those furphy spermacides during the second world war it's the Coke Side of Pro Life.

Thanks to TheImaginator: Digg.com, Asianplumb: blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au, candafilm: Digg.com.

As I predicted, the the IG Nobel prizes have provided a veritable minefield of fodder for a Hodgeblodge entry or two, you can read the real story here: The prize was awarded to two teams of doctors—one team discovered that Coke is an effective spermacide; the other team discovered that it is not.
(improbable.com)

Schrödinger's LOL cat and my WOMbat in a box

"Schrödinger's cat" was a legendary thought experiment to explain an abstract situation which occurs when you apply the rules for very small particles to life-sized objects..

You are not sure whether the cat is in the box because, even though you put him there, there is a small probability that he is at any point in the universe.

When you look inside the box you will know if he is there or not. But the process of looking inside the box makes the cat "decide" whether it is there or not...

As this was such a legendary thought experiment, Schrödinger's LOL cat just had to already exist, and here it is...

more animals
...but surely I'm the first to think up this tenuous link...

From Schrödinger's LOL cat in a box to my WOMbat in a box

The concept of WOM, (people talking about something and/or recommending it) has some similarities with the concept described by Schrödinger's cat. You stimulate some WOM, so now the WOMbat is growing, consuming the audience in his box. The WOM affects the system within the box, you have some evidence he is doing that, but then as Lolly asks...

moar funny pictures

...what is the end result? How do you know when the WOMbat is successful? You can do a general survey outside the box but you won't be able to ask the people inside the WOMbat's box at the time without affecting the WOMbat. Anyway, doing general surveys is old style market research. I find it somewhat ironic that the proponents of the brave new world of social media marketing resort to this to sell themselves.

Perhaps social media marketers have to be clever and measure not just the number of times a post is read, but also the number of diggs, stumbles, forum thanks and review site reccomends. Rationalising all that could be tough though...

It Rocks

Geology

• Upper - Sarson tertiary sandstone at Avebury stone circle, Wilts.
• Lower - Devonian old red sandstone on the Brecon Beacons, Powys.

As Wacko Jacko (my Geology teacher) used to say wryly: "Perhaps the more sentimental of you may have stopped to admire the view."

ROWE ROWE ROWE the pun(t)

Reading Sylwia's interesting post on the results only work ethics model (ROWE for short) has inspired me to reveal something of my past experiences as a grad student. As Sylwia says, you can learn more about what ROWE involves on Lyndsay Blakely's post. In basic terms it is a work model where employees chose how much they work and are judged purely on results.

I would say that ROWE comes as standard for scientists in universities, here's why

• The work a group does and the money coming in is judged on perceived merit
• Must compete with Japanese and Americans who take goal orientation to the n'th degree
  
• The passion required and low salary mean that it is a vocation more often than not
  
• Supervisors would be hypocritical if they denied access to the social opportunities they themselves enjoyed as grad students, they may chose instead to dangle carrots like conference tickets for achieving milestones.

According to the post meantioned before "Perhaps the most significant one is the fact that for a ROWE to be effective, it requires a mature, goal-oriented manager." The crushing irony of the subtext of this sentence is, that the manager in question probably can't learn this maturity in a ROWE workplace. My conclusion is therefore:

Academics need to have done other jobs to to get good at their job!

They could also do with setting their job as supervisors in the context of corporations trying out ROWE. As a grad student, I was always told things like "it's different in academia" maybe it's not so different after all.

Guess I've learnt some things about management from my academic roller-coaster ride anyway. I will have to upload the journal article I contributed to one of these days, see how good my science communication and marketing is as I keep on banging on about it.

The World Wide Web Foundation (can anyone get excited about web standards?)

Tim Bernhards-Lee, inventor of the internet at CERN in 1989 has been sharing his vision of how it could help the world in the future. He hopes to do this through the launch of http://www.webfoundation.org/. Reading the website, I am a bit bemused as to what the aim of the organisation is, as are a number of commenters on Molly E. Holzschlag's blog.

The hot air about the LHC at CERN gave Tim the perfect example to tell us that "The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science" as described in a BBC article by Pallab Gosh. From Steven Clark's post I think I'm right in saying that Bernhards-Lee proposes making the web searchable by correctness rather than relevance. The plan might work, unfortunately the Web Foundation site doesn't get the message across effectively.

I think that Bernhard Lee's mistake is to think of those talking about science as being different to those talking about any other product or event. Bit of a mouthful I know, but I would prefer if he said:

"Science is fun, and it's great when people talk about it. It is the responsibility of the scientist to make their work so easy to understand and remarkable that the space of malicious rumours is reduced. When rumours do occur the scientist can reach out and educate the community, speaking a language they understand"

Would it not be great if the creators of this viral video got a guided tour of the CERN facility for their troubles?

No doubt there is some room for an internet policeman, but if NASA can win the marketing war, there is no reason why MMR vaccines, particle accelerators or NGOs can't. Some of the large funds for this project could be diverted into philanthropic marketing projects perhaps.

You can follow the Web Foundation on twitter @webfoundation

Review of Ben Elton's Blind Faith - Social Media has yet to convince everyone!!

Whilst it is true that as I read it I was reminded of Nineteen Eighty Four by the totalitarian nature of the public rule; It's a completely different style of novel with a completely different message. Privacy is illegal, everyone shares everything, people are constantly watched big brother style in their own homes and group hugs are compulsory. Silence is an expensive commodity. Read this book, laugh at it, then go and watch tv or speak to a teenager or work in a certain office I may or may not work in and be very, very scared.

This is 1984 for the MySpace generation. Ben Elton is a shadow of himself.If we want pontification, we can plug into Gordon Brown. Is it a reworking of 1984? Is it an allegory of our CCTV society? Is it a swipe at fundamentalism? To be honest I do not know

With thanks to
M. Stapleton "Mel Stapleton" Queenie91 "Queenie" Helenbookworm M. van Beek "Noldor" M. D. Colebourne "Blackblade" Careless Heart Roger Boyle

Ms. K. Phillips can have the final word

Sorry for writing a review Ben, Amazon likes us to "share"

Of course all these reviews are from Amazon.co.uk (I got lazy on this entry)

Hot air about the LHC at CERN - the hot circular lack of air

As the dust (that would be there if the CERN place wasn't really clean) settles on the bing bang story I would like to ask: Will they be able to generate this level of conversation when the high energy experiments kick off next year?

In the case of space missions, launches have become commonplace and no longer remarkable. From that moment on though, we have a definite time of arrival to look forward to. NASA also uses analogy well and underplays expectations. For example: even though previous missions had "found good evidence" of water on Mars, the lastest probe "touched" it. Most of the probes "last longer than expected"as well. I particularly enjoyed a workshop I went to at last year Piers Sellers (Britain's current Astronaut). Those guys are certainly half decent science communicators.

In the case of the LHC at CERN, the beauty of the engineering is now old news. Next spring there will probably be some new strangeness numbers for bosons. It will be interesting to see how the CERN marketing guys spread the word. As we tire of being told that the world might end, maybe they'll have to resort to calling particles mythical.

A statue of...Gandalf!!

dscf1903
Originally uploaded by StretAndy

Portcullis with a star called Sol

dscf2104
Originally uploaded by StretAndy

Hero Square

Hero Square
Originally uploaded by StretAndy

I started playing with my camera by putting it on the ground in the shadow of things. One day I will actually buy a lens that I can use a filter on... until that day my ccd detector can just take a hit.

The lights on in the day time!

dscf1985
Originally uploaded by StretAndy

Labyrinth in Buda

We didn't really consider the fact that all three of us are mildly afraid of the dark. The trouble is you must first find the beam of light in complete darkness without banging into the stone walls. There even was this fountain of wine, which I thought, smelled awful. It looked more like blood flowing from the tap. We spend like 1 hour there and we lost like 3 times.

With thanks respectively to Emily Kahn of http://gelatoandwine.blogspot.com Megan Meadows of http://worldramblers.com/, the author of http://www.linguist-in-waiting.com/ and whitewolf22 of http://whitewolf22.livejournal.com/

Towards the end of the "tour," we got to a series of rooms called the "other world."
Particular thanks to Heidirific of http://heidirific37.blogspot.com, this was my favourite part too. See, the descriptions of the rooms were written in a future perspective looking back on the world today. The world was occupied by homoconsumerists and they led a strange life indeed.

John, Evan, and Marshall from http://twelvecountries.blogspot.com perhaps had an opposing view
You get to the first fossil, which has a footprint. You read the plaque - it says "footprint, circa 42 million years ago." You look at the footprint again... and see a nike swoosh. Seriously. This is Hungarian humor at its finest.

Reading all the plaques however I came to realise that this was genuinely a respectable piece of satirical art. The people designing it had perhaps been influenced by the endgame sequence in Sid Meier's Civilization. "There were no traces of culture, art or religion" Perhaps it's possible that a section of our society could consume and de-evolve itself to extinction. I will explore these ideas further in my forthcoming review of Ben Elton's novel Blind Faith.

Cattle shown to align north-south

Very interesting! I never noticed this while "tipping cows" If I realised that factor in my oreinteering days I would have forgetten about compass and GPS and grabbed a cow. You learn something new every day. ARGH Cows - they're always up to something sneaky.

Magnetic fields? Next thing is some journalist reporting that cows are the culprits behind crop circles. "The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle..." In a related note, the scientists were also unable to distinguish between holes in the ground and their own rear ends. Utter nonsense! Moo!

Thanks to BBC News Goppy, Sik, Doug Parsons, Amielog, Slimey, Mr. Common Sense and Babel fish, the last word can go to St Udio

I've been keeping a mental track of my own sleeping/resting position since the 1970s.
generally myself and all my local relatives favor a north-south alignment.