Dear Blog readers - Owing to extreme busyness, this blog is on hiatus for the near future.  Thanks for following science policy news with me over the past few years.

Jaylan Turkkan

Associate Vice President for Research, San Francisco State University 

With all the recent national attention on women's health, let's spotlight the Office of Research on Women's Health at the NIH. Created in 1990 within the Office of the NIH Director, ORWH makes sure that women and minorities are included in clinical research, who were often excluded in large early trials.  

ORWH also promotes and supports research on women’s health and, not known to me earlier, sex differences research.  

Many PIs don't know that ORWH co-funds research grants by partnering with NIH Institutes and Centers. These opportunities are listed here. 

 

 

A new phone app developed by researchers at San Francisco State and six other universities can collect real-time information about surface currents by the Golden Gate Bridge, Oakland Bay Bridge and Richmond Bridge. The app uses Google (GOOG) maps, GPS technology and shore-based radar sensors on Angel Island, Treasure Island, Tiburon, Sausalito and Fort Point in San Francisco.

"We put together what we thought recreational boaters would find helpful so they could see what the currents are going to be," said Toby Garfield, professor of geosciences and director of the university's Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies. "The GPS actually shows up in the app. So when you are in the Bay, you can see what the currents are doing."

Faculty of 1000, or F1000 is a for-profit company who maintains an actively curated online database of over 100K evaluations of published articles in biology and medicine. Post-publication, articles are culled and scored by their growing list of experts (ie, clinical and basic scientists). F1000 claims to cover at least 3K journals.

This year F1000 began an experimental open source publishing venture (F1000 Research) that departs from the usual model in many significant ways: Instant publication (after a "sanity check" says the editor Rebecca Lawrence), real time revisioning and versioning (sounds like--- wiki), data repositories, links to other articles and open peer commentary are some of the new (or old) ideas that will be tested. Lawrence notes that the scientific community is naturally worried about instant publication and quality control.

Commenters also worry that since this is a for-profit venture, if there is significant adoption of the F1000 Research model, the platform will become private and/or exploitative in familiar ways. However, to quote one savvy commenter "I am much happier with a private company providing a service that makes content open than I am with a private company taking my content and making it private." 

It will be interesting to see how this venture fares, and whether it is portable to humanities and other scholarly areas.  

This month, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released what I hope will become a transformative report on accelerating Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) graduates in the U.S.: ENGAGE TO EXCEL: PRODUCING ONE MILLION ADDITIONAL COLLEGE GRADUATES WITH DEGREES IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,ENGINEERING, AND MATHEMATICS (this follows an earlier report K-12 STEM education, Prepare and Inspire).

PCAST's five recommendations (paraphrased):

1. adopt empirically validated teaching practices;
2. replace standard lab courses with discovery-based research courses;
   
3. launch a national experiment (eg, summer/remedial/bridge/adjacent disciplines) in postsecondary math education ($20M/yr for 5 yrs - out of NSF, DoL and ED budgets);
   
4. encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversify pathways to STEM careers (i.e., there is no one pipeline); and
   
5. create a Presidential Council on STEM Education (include business communities) 

In #1, I especially like the recommendation that the National Academies develop metrics to evaluate STEM education. I've seen too many solely soft outcomes of STEM programs such as "students reported that they felt more engaged."

Every year the American Cancer Society publishes cancer statistics for the US population with data compiled from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and mortality data from the National Center for Health