I discovered The Guild of Scientific Troubadours because they linked to one of our articles. The interesting hook? "Membership in the guild is restricted only to those musicians capable of keeping the Guild Pledge: To write, record and submit one (1) song per month based on a story in one of a number of scientific publications." Who would have thought it? We are not on their list of approved "scientific publications", though something odd like physorg.com that only reprints AP articles and university press releases is. So maybe they don't want to write songs about articles written by actual scientists?

Alf Eaton shows how to gather scientific reaction to open access scientific articles He has written javascript code bookmarklets to aid in tracking conversations about peer research papers. If you try it out, you have to use the delicious one or bloglines. None of those little Nature group services carry any of our stuff.

http://monkeytrials.blogspot.com/2008/01/sunshine-state-is-in-process-of.html created a county by county graphic of school boards in FL that are opposing evolution.

Stop slashing science funding, says Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. He's a pretty old school guy, I'll give him that, but it's not just a funding issue, it's also a corporate convenience issue. We're just plain getting beat and government funding won't cure that - but a corporate halt to outsourcing will. I am not saying outsourcing is all bad - smart people everywhere deserve to compete and it prevents laziness - but if he's going to take a stand, he should have Intel put its money where his mouth is. I also here and now restate my belief that rather than throwing more money at the problem of making more American into scientists, we should make more scientists into Americans.

This seems obvious but Everybody Doesn't Need Psychotherapy. Like many other disciplines, a few shysters can make everyone look bad, and then out and out charlatans, like Eugene Landy with Brian Wilson, can really send the reputation of something into the tank.

I found a good recap of some recent gene postings at biomarker-driven mental health 2.0. Unlike most of these 'carnivals', this isn't the same cabal of self-promoting monkeys creating these as a way to improve their SEO by making attention-whoring linkfests to each other. So I am linking to him, because he deserves some good karma for putting in the effort.