I see red

There was some serious geeking-out going on in the office just now—at least, in the part where the dev team and myself interact. IT have been wandering around the joint with little white boxes that have aerials sticking out of them, and then Phil came over and asked for my MAC.

A little while later I turned on my iPhone’s wireless connection and entered the URL of our development server, and this is what I saw:

new f1000.com site

And that, ladles and gentlespoons, is why I’m at f1000. For the past six months I’ve been managing and organizing a rebuild of the user site. This is a preview of the revamped website, which we aim to launch to you lucky boys and girls in early December. Just in time for Christmas.

Rather happily, even though it’s not specifically designed for mobile browsers (the screen capture above is our development server on my iPhone: it’s not using mobile stylesheets) the new site looks (and works!) pretty nicely. Richard P has been showing it off on his ITC HTC Hero, too (none of the dev team would be seen dead with a Blackberry, natch).

Of course, I could have just showed you a preview in Safari or Firefox from my desktop, but that wouldn’t have been half so cool.

Huzzahs all round.

Who will fight for researchers’ rights?

Is it just a wall of ideology that separates animal researchers from animal rights campaigners?

If so, why has it often seemed like a one-sided argument: activists brandishing placards, rocks, slogans and some dodgy statistics that persuade an ill-informed public, while those actually doing the research only speak up when they find a cure for a disease.

This was the subject of a recent opinion piece, We Must Face the Threats by Dario Ringach and David Jentsch from the University of California in the Journal of Neuroscience. The evaluations on Faculty of 1000 from an unusually high number of senior scientists showed the impact this has on the science community.

My friends over at NC3Rs and other agencies are funding programmes to replace and reduce the number of animals used in research but for the areas where this is currently not possible,  Jentsch and Ringach argue that scientists should not have to suffer the harassment and misinformation campaigns directed at them by animal rights campaigners.

While the media hasn’t been as forthcoming in identifying it as a great story, our Faculty Members and their colleagues and supporters obviously see it as vital that the truth comes out. One Faculty Member from a German institute even said “the article …  should be part of the standard curriculum, discussed in seminars, schools and in public”.

There are several problems here for scientists looking to tell the public what their research is really for, why they need to use animals in the lab and why animal rights protestors generally get it wrong.

One is the proliferation of faux science and stats that filled the void created when college Deans of  medicine, pharma company directors and others benefiting from animal research decided to keep quiet in the face of protest.

Well-known critic of (in his opinion) the misuse of science, Ben Goldacre, even gave a reason back in 2006 for why he chooses to skirt around the animal rights issue:

I’ve generally steered clear of writing about animal rights stuff, partly because I don’t often see them making straight bad science claims in the mainstream media, but also because I can’t be bothered with taking my shirt off, strapping an AK47 across my pecs, storming a building single-handed smeared in engine oil while choppers circle above, and rescuing the kids from kidnappers, all over again.

He played it safe and sarcastic but it hits at the same Catch-22 that Jentsch, Ringach et al. were talking about: fear of retaliation has outweighed the need for scientists to start tackling rights group’s claims and begin a real discussion with them and the public.

F1000 celebrates our Nobel laureates

Photo by Susan Merrell

Elizabeth Blackburn – a member of the International Advisory Board for F1000 Biology – was awarded the Nobel Prize in the Physiology or Medicine category this week, joining a prestigious group of F1000 Nobel winners and nominees.

Professor Blackburn and colleagues received the honour in the Physiology or Medicine category this week for their work on the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. The three winners – Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak – have also had academic papers evaluated by F1000 Faculty Members.

Advisory board member Mike Bishop was awarded the prize  in 1989 for his team’s discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.

Other F1000 members to have received the prestigious award include Section Head for Chemical Biology, Roger Tsien (1998); Section Head for Chemistry, Tim Hunt (2001) and Faculty Member for Neuroscience, Erwin Neher (1991).

Don’t stand so close to me

I’ve been at f1000 for six months now, and this is the third desk I’ve had. Just to keep me on my toes I’m due to move again.

This is because our operational side is expanding and they need more seats. As one of our sister companies recently got absorbed by the 600 lb gorilla of open access, BioMed Central, Steve and me get to move to the salubrious north side of the building. It’s further from the kitchen and nearer the fire escape.

We had hoped to move earlier this week, but it’s Friday already, and things have been put on hold. This is a bit of a downer because I’ve been given my very own young apprentice, who is currently stuck in a galaxy far, far away an otherwise deserted office somewhere near Wozzon. And he was supposed to sit near to me so I can keep an eye on him, get him to fetch tea, etc.

Thing is, part of the re-seating plan involves the S&M, um, Sales and Marketing team moving to the same area. But currently, Web of Stories is based over that way too.

What’s the problem? you might well ask.

Well, editing videos for WoS involves listening to stuff. And Sales and Marketing are, apparently, too damned noisy.

That’s the way

One of the great things about my job is that I see into many aspects of the publishing juggernaut that is Faculty of 1000. So not only am I privy to what Sales and Marketing get up to (this morning, for example, they were making up new words to Christmas Carols*), but I can also poke the orc-driven cogs of Isengard.

Or ‘Development’, as we call it in-house.

Hidden deep within the SNG intranet are a couple of wikis, which we use to keep each other informed, and collaborate on documents, etc. I discovered the Development wiki a couple of weeks ago, and while most of it is full of fascinating tips on how to use Velocity Macros to stop dirty little hobbits from throwing spanners into the fires of Barad-dûr, there’s the occasional gem such as

XML is like violence: if it’s not solving all your problems, you’re not using enough of it.

I just thought I’d share that with you.