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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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The guys at RealClimate do a pretty good analysis of Past reconstructions: problems, pitfalls and progress in the context of puncturing some recent contrarian data. They leave out that this exact same argument (and there is a lack of zeal in demanding the same honesty from that side of that debate) applies to plenty of data that has been used suspiciously in numerical models. I will say it again, like I have a dozen times. In any science, if you have 50 million data points and choose 500, that's perfectly valid, but how you choose them and which data points you choose makes a huge difference in the results and far too many climate models have failed the honesty test there.
I only learned about Genome Technology Online because they linked to one of our articles, but they look pretty slick.
Niche sites spread science on the web. I'm not sure how 'niche' or 'independent' it is if it has university and NSF funding along with PLoS marketing. Clearly they're not in USA Today because they're the only ones who thought of this.

It's hard to say when scientists realized that policy makers were not always going to make the best decisions regarding science funding but a safe bet would be somewhere before 3,000 BC.

In the intervening 5,000 years, not a lot has changed in how well scientists, politicians and the public really understand each other. A week doesn't go by when there isn't an article lamenting that one project or another doesn't get funding or that one government bureau is over-zealous or too conservative.

Scientists learned early that the best way to get the message across to the people who can truly influence policy makers was to consult them directly. In past ages it was advisors to kings.

I think we got the issues with the database server fixed. It appears something went horribly wrong with the search indices or the actual modules, we still don't know yet, but disabling them stopped the memory-sucking madness that has been happening. We'll get it fixed tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience and general slowness.
Dan Rhoads just started a site called Bitesize Bio - making cell and molecular biology make sense. Check it out.