Science blogging seems to be the hot topic this week.  First, there was this short piece in the Economist about “User-generated Science“, and now Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith are adding to the conversation (somewhat ironically) through a publication in this week’s PLoS Biology (article).  It’s a short read, I definitely recommend checking it out.

The authors do an excellent job describing the merits of blogging about science – namely, quick peer review and dissemination of information to a larger audience than a journal or trade publication would reach.  They cite several examples of science blogs being used as educational tools in the K-12 classroom.  My favorite example of these is Cognitive Daily, written by Dave and Greta Munger (Dave is also the founder of ResearchBlogging.org, an aggregator for quality blogging about peer-reviewed research).  The husband-and-wife duo dissect recent publications in the cognitive sciences and do a great job explaining the findings in a clear and concise way.  I also really enjoy their ‘casual friday’ posts in which they conduct their own experiments through online polling software and analyze the results in a future post.  Dave and Greta even organize their posts into convenient categories that K-12 teachers can use to supplement their curriculum.

The most substantial portion of the Batts, Anthis & Smith paper is a discussion on what institutions can do to benefit from resident science bloggers, and how this involvement can benefit the bloggers in return.  Their primary suggestion is for institutions to create an aggregator, similar to Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs, which organizes all the blogs kept by members (be they staff, faculty, or students) of an institution by category and has a portal that displays recent posts and comments.  This kind of thing is already being done at Stanford (here).

I think there are some inherent problems in the “institutional blogging” solution which Batts et al propose.

First, I imagine being hosted by and promoted through your institution would influence the content of your posts.  It would be difficult (and perhaps not even permitted) to critique work done at one’s own institution or new policies or happenings about the university.  I doubt absolute censorship would occur except in the most extreme cases, but there would be a conflict of interest, I think.

Additionally, I don’t think that institutional blogging will solve many of the problems in science blogging.  Organizing content by institution doesn’t make much sense – just because I like Semir Zeki’s blog (http://profzeki.blogspot.com) doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll like or be interested in other blogs by UCL professors or students.  Instead, I’d like to be given ready access to other blogs that deal with similar (though somewhat unique) subject matter.  This is where ScienceBlogs really shines – they have a great collection of diverse and high-quality blogs that deal with all manner of topics, and they organize their content into “channels” of related blogs.

Thus, I think an open version of ScienceBlogs which allows (most) all submitted blogs to be indexed and aggregated would have the best potential for bringing together interesting and varied science content.  To avoid reliance on a single site, perhaps the site (OpenScienceBlogs?) could aggregate from RSS feeds and just display the content of the feed on the portal site, while linking to the original post for comments.  Or, plugins could be written for WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc that could make all this content aggregation relatively seamless.  Each blog could be tagged with different attributes, such as Topic (evolution, neuroscience, physics, etc), Institution, Author Information (student status, major/concentration, class year), and type of blog (research, pop sci, multi-author, etc) to make finding interesting and relevant blogs fast and easy.

This, I feel, would be an optimal way to organize and access content.  Little work would be required on the part of the bloggers (except maybe the installation of a plugin), it would require minimal staff to maintain, and hosting costs would be generally low.  Additionally, this could be combined with the institutional “badges” mentioned in the paper to confer legitimacy to the blogs (i.e., in order to display your institution’s badge, you have to submit posts to an editor or committee for review, etc).  I think it would be fair to institute community quality control measures, like those used by ResearchBlogging.org, to ensure members are posting relevant and appropriate content.  There would need to be some approval process, but it should be rapid and minimal to encourage participation.  This system would funnel readers to blogs that they’re interested in, as well as surround them with similar content they may not have discovered elsewhere.  Bloggers would get more readers, readers would have more to read and comment on and blog about – everyone wins.

If there’s anyone out there that thinks this is a good idea and knows anything about web development, contact me – I’d love to get started on a project like this.  Or if something like this is already around, please let me know.

Other posts/articles about science blogging:

Living the Scientific Life: Science blogs can advance the academic process

The Scientific Activist: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy (by Nick Anthis, an author on the PLoS Biology paper)

You’ve been falsely accused of a crime – a crime for which you could receive a life sentence if convicted.  The hard evidence is shaky at best.  The prosecution comes to you with a new idea: attach 32 electrodes to your scalp and listen to a series of sentences while the electrical fields caused by brain activity are recorded and analyzed.  The scientists claim that your pattern of brain activity will be different depending on whether you were there (thus, it will reflect ‘experiential memories’) or if you have only heard about the event.

This is the scenario reflected in a recent International Herald Tribune article sent to me by a friend.  Indian courts are now accepting results from the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test (BEOS) as evidence in criminal trials.  A young woman accused of murdering her husband was convicted to life in prison based in part on results from a BEOS test.  The woman, Aditi Sharma, insists she is innocent.

The IHT article reports that the judge wrote a 9-page defense of BEOS in his decision on the case, though there is no scientific consensus as to the accuracy of this test.  It has not been reported in any peer-reviewed scientific journals and has not been carefully evaluated by the neuroscientific community as a whole.  The article, though, is unclear as to whether the BEOS evidence was the deciding factor in the case or if it was solely corroborating evidence that supported the prosecution’s argument.  The 9-page defense makes it seem as though the BEOS test was an important part of this conviction.

In a comment on a relevant post on the Neuroethics and Law Blog, Dr. Lawrence Farwell is quick to distance this technology with his own work on ‘brain fingerprinting‘ – a peer-reviewed and highly-tested alternative that is allowed as scientific evidence in US courts.

The prospect of neuroimaging-based lie detection technologies is nothing new and has been featured in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and The New Atlantis as a possible alternative to the modern polygraph machine.  There is certainly an appealing quality to looking inside a person’s skull, where surely the truth must be hiding in a pattern of bloodflow, synchronous neural firing, or synapse formation.  Maybe one day a criminal won’t even need to be asked any questions at all – we would only need to attach some electrodes and slide him/her inside a magnet and do some complicated physics and statistics to compare his brain to an enormous database of all kinds of criminals and non-criminals.  This is just one way we may be able to decide guilt or innocence in a completely objective way.

Am I not the only person absolutely terrified by this prospect?  The worst part is, it’s not that unfeasible.  It will certainly take a while for this latter scenario to become realized, but a slew of recent developments suggests this may someday be possible.  A group out of UC Berkeley has recently reported on a striking ability to identify which of a large pool of images a person is looking at using fMRI and a sophisticated receptive field model (Nature article), and a different group from Carnegie Mellon University is using image classifiers gathered from other subjects to accurately decide which image a given subject is viewing (PLoS One article).  The popular press reported on these findings as “mind reading” and brought up the obvious possibility of neuroimaging-based lie detection.

Right now, though, as long as scientists are appropriately conservative about the application of these technologies beyond the realms for which they are ready, we have nothing to worry about.  I think this quote from the IHT article sums things up pretty nicely:

“I find this both interesting and disturbing,” Henry Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford Law School, said of the Indian verdict. “We keep looking for a magic, technological solution to lie detection. Maybe we’ll have it someday, but we need to demand the highest standards of proof before we ruin people’s lives based on its application.”

If you’re interested in this topic (neuroscience and law), be sure to check out the conference videos from Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law first annual conference.  This topic, among many others, were addressed by experts in the field, including lawyers, forensic psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists.

Sorry for the severe lack of updates, the school year has been far busier than I anticipated. I’m writing this post from one of the hurricane shelters at Rice while waiting for the brunt of Ike to hit. I’m trying to keep friends, family, and coworkers updated about the conditions here and what’s going on in the center of everything. To see these updates, follow me on Twitter (http://Twitter.com/m_ostlyharmless). Anytime there’s a big change and I still have cell or Internet access I’ll post an update, hopefully with pictures. I was going to work on a few overdue science/tech posts, but my computer is less charged than I anticipated. Anyway, message me on Twitter with any comments, etc. For all those seriously affected by the storm, stay safe and keep dry. See y’all on the other side.