PHD Comics: Science News Cycle

PHD Comics: Science News Cycle

With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books – NYTimes.com

With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books – NYTimes.com

An expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites.

Irish student hoaxes worlds media with fake quote – Yahoo! Finance

Irish student hoaxes worlds media with fake quote – Yahoo! Finance

A sociology student added a fictional quote to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28, 2009.  It was picked up and reported by dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the inaccurate material even though administrators at the Wikipedia twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.

“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” the student said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

Merck published fake journal :The Scientist [30th April 2009]

Merck published fake journal :The Scientist [30th April 2009]

“Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products–that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.”

The city without a memory: treasures lost under collapsed Cologne archives – Times Online

The city without a memory: treasures lost under collapsed Cologne archives – Times Online

The archives building in Cologne, Germany inexplicably collapsed. Many unque and valuable documents were lost. No one yet knows why it collapsed. The building had once been regarded as a model for archives.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm allows you to post to multiple blogs simultaneously. This is a test posting. – SA

Docuticker » Blog Archive » FTC Staff Revises Online Behavioral Advertising Principles

Docuticker » Blog Archive » FTC Staff Revises Online Behavioral Advertising Principles

The FTC issued guidelines for online advertising. The report discusses the potential benefits of online advertising, including the free online content often provided, and it also discusses the privacy concerns that the practice of collecting personal information raises.

BatesInfoTip newsletter – February 2009 – When Online Isn’t Enough

BatesInfoTip newsletter – February 2009 – When Online Isn’t Enough

If you’ve searched and searched and can’t find the information you need, sometimes the phone is what you need. If you found last year’s report, call the authors and ask them if they can help, “being the leading experts in the field.” (Flattery can work wonders.)

Psychology of Pain: An Ig Nobel prize for a study on placebo effects

Psychology of Pain: An Ig Nobel prize for a study on placebo effects

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely won an Ig Nobel award for his study that found more expensive fake medicines work better than cheaper fake medicines.

Evidence-Based Nursing & Midwifery: An early evidence-based review or Have you disinfected your books today?

Evidence-Based Nursing & Midwifery: An early evidence-based review or Have you disinfected your books today?

Blog links to an article in the Medical Journal of Australia from 2001″Books as carriers of disease.”

“In the early years of bacteriology, librarians, microbiologists and public health physicians were much exercised by the question of whether books could transmit infectious diseases. which pointed me back to an evidenced-based review that appeared in 1912 in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.”