Element FYI

The Element List blog has a new address and new, fancier digs. Click here to find the new Element List blog.

A couple of little known facts about Ze Frank, video blog impresario of "The Show with Ze Frank," are that he was once a promising neuroscience student at Brown University before he left to pursue music with his band and that his father is Joachim Frank (pictured right), a molecular biologist at the Wadsworth Center and recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. In Wednesday's installment of The Show, Ze put his neuroscience training to use in answering a viewer's question on how best to prepare for final exams. His carefully researched tip: get some sleep.

If you are considering making the jump from academia to biotech, check out the "Industry Insights" online seminar series produced by NatureJobs and the Stanford School of Medicine Career Center (SoMCC). With only two video segments so far, the "series" is a little thin, but the choice selection of companies represented makes the series particularly informative. In the first installment, Michael Alvarez, founder and director of SoMCC, speaks with Hal Barron, Senior VP at Genentech, named in 2006 by Fortune magazine as the best company to work for and by Science magazine as the top employer and most admired company for the fifth year in a row. In the second segment, Alvarez speaks with Nandini Tandon, venture partner with MDS Capital, about biotech invesment and careers combining science, banking and finance. Tandon's PowerPoint presentation slides (shown above) are also available on the website.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports on a new website called Swivel that is billing itself as the "YouTube for Data." Swivel is (or will be) an open database for uploading, downloading, analyzing, and viewing all kinds of data, from weather data to financial data. The analytical capabilities mentioned so far are correlations between datasets, such as weather and stocks. Arrington predicts that academics will "go nuts over this," but do they realize how many scientific databases exist already? Swivel may be useful as the everyman's database as well as a good place to make data accessible to others when institutional red tape makes university or other academic databases impractical or otherwise impossible. But now imagine the havoc the site could wreck when proprietary data is uploaded to the site, whether it's a scientists's stolen research data or a pharmaceutical company's drug testing data. The damage could be as bad as or worse than what traditional media companies are facing with regard to copyright violations and piracy. For an extra fee, the site provides the option to keep your data private. Now this could be handy for researchers who want a place to store datasets without the hassle of buying their own hardware. There's no word yet on what the cost of private data storage will be. Swivel is expected to launch later this week.

At least three videos of the East Java volcanic mudflow have been posted on YouTube over the past few months. Between the photos and the videos, it seems that ordinary people have had limited access to the flooded area, since many familiar scenes have shown up more than once. In each of the videos below, however, the 'reporters' appear to have had some special access to get closer to the crater by virtue of their being a BBC reporter, an oil company employee, or a charming tourist.

• BBC Report - Andrew Harding reports for the BBC on the Java mud volcano four months after the eruption. According to the report, workers are drilling down to the source of the mudflow, where they will attempt to block the flow by pumping in concrete. At the same time, workers are building an earthen wall to contain the flow and pumping some of the muddy water into the river, potentially creating a second environmental disaster.
• Oil Contractor Video - This video was recorded in September by an American with a southern accent who appears to be an oil company employee (based also on his other videos). There's very little narration, but the video does show a fire monitor exposed on dry land in August and mostly submerged only 18 days later in September following a sudden subsidence of the land. The land has subsided five meters since the eruption in May.
• American Tourist Video - Jonbone17, an American tourist, charmed the local Indonesian oil field workers into letting him roam around near the crater. They even posed for pictures with him (above). The last half of the video is actually a slideshow with good images of the new dam/wall that's being built to contain the mudflow.

The American press seems to be largely ignoring the huge environmental and humanitarian disaster in Indonesia that began in May when a mud volcano erupted during drilling in East Java. Thanks to the internet's series of tubes, we can now turn to sites like Flickr for photos of the volcano and local residents as they cope with the disaster. Flickr photo contributors have posted some amazing pictures of the mudflow, such as the top right picture of the crater by Greenpeace, the bottom left picture taken by Farl on a roadside in Sidoarjo, East Java, and top left and bottom right pictures of residents celebrating the end of Ramadan in late October by Mata Adalah Cahaya. Mata has an excellent Flickr slideshow of her pictures here. See also pictures by Bromund Volker.

The countdown is on to find a gift for every geeky friend and familiy member you have. Tracking down those one or two perfect gifts can be hard. What do you give a geek who already has everything? Why, give them the hottest gadget of the season, of course. No, not a video game player. A DVD Rewinder! The one and only DVD Rewinder from DVDRewinder.com spins disks backwards and plays rewind sounds in MP3 format. You can even download new rewind sounds and load them onto the rewinder through the MP3 port. But this handy gadget does more than rewind DVDs. It also rewinds CDs and video games. A built-in compartment also holds disc cleaner, providing simultaneous cleaning and rewinding capability. Just read what customers like Josh Wickham have to say.

How did Larry Small get the Smithsonian Secretary job in the first place? For one thing, he's never led a research institution, museum, or a non-profit before. Instead, his entire professional life has been spent in ... banking. Twenty-seven years at Citicorp. Eight years at Fannie Mae. Guess all that banking experience would mean that he knows something about making money with other people's stuff. As this 2002 article from Archeology magazine entitled "Crisis at the Smithsonian" suggests, it seems that Small has been on the path to selling out the Smithsonian for quite some time:

While the Board of Regents justified Small's appointment by arguing that he brought with him the kind of management competence and business savvy the institution needed to improve its bottom line, he and his policies have been attacked in editorials in major newspapers, and by academics and conservators both inside and outside the Smithsonian. During his tenure, directors of seven museums have submitted their resignations. Congress has intervened after Small's cutbacks included the proposed closure of the institution's animal biodiversity research facility. Small seemed to raise hackles wherever he went, even on his home turf.

Commercial sponsorship of museum exhibitions has been another bone of contention. Donations from Fujifilm, Kmart, General Motors, and Catherine B. Reynolds for a "Hall of Achievers," sparked a flurry of letters, including an open letter from a group of 170 scholars, authors, and academics to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the chancellor of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents. "If Mr. Small is permitted to continue his agenda," it read, "the Smithsonian will become much like a shopping mall, with virtually every inch devoted to the promotion of a corporation or its product."

His personal life has also been dogged by controversy. After pictures of Small's private collection of South American masks, headdresses, and costumes appeared in the January 2000 issue of Smithsonian magazine, he was investigated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which suspected that the pictures showed feathers from protected bird species and teeth from endangered cats. The service opened the investigation in November, closed it in March 2001, and reopened it last summer after the service reviewed additional information from published of Small's collection and reports from ornithologists.

Small pleaded guilty in January 2004 to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for his collection of Amazonian bird feathers that allegedly included feathers from endangered species.

The Smithsonian Institution is continuing its efforts to sneak its new 30-year exclusive contract to create programming based on its archives with the CBS Showtime Network past Congress and the American public to the horror of academic researchers, documentary filmmakers, and other networks, such as PBS. As explained by Carl Malamud at the Center for American Progress, the new video-on-demand channel called "Smithsonian On Demand" will have "the right of first refusal on any access to Smithsonian collections and staff. For example, if Ken Burns wishes to make a movie that makes "non-incidental use" of the Smithsonian archives or involves "non-incidental" access to staff, he could not offer his movie to PBS. Instead, he would have to offer it to the new venture." The Smithsonian-Showtime deal was conducted in secret, and the contract itself has not been made public. You can find a video webcast and a transcript of the May 25, 2006 Congressional oversight hearing on the deal here, which was chaired by Congressman Vernon Ehlers, a former research physicist and professor. Congress followed up with a slapdown of Smithsonian leaders over the issue by proposing significant budget cuts. Now, as both houses of Congress work to iron out differences in the 2007 budget, the Smithsonian Institution has sent lobbyists to Capitol Hill to convince lawmakers that everyone has forgotten about the inconsequential 30-year secret contract. Carl Malamud, who has made a career of placing government data online and for the public, recently emailed a call to action to increase public pressure on Congress to make the Smithsonian-Showtime contract public and to hold public hearings on the deal. It's too late to sign Malamud's petition, but it's not too late to contact your Congressman or call for the resignation of Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small.

The Java mud volcano that was triggered by drilling last May shows no signs of stopping more than six months since the first eruption. BBC News reports that the mud volcano is erupting at a rate of 130,000 cubic meters per day compared to 5,000 cubic meters per day last spring. The land around the volcano has subsided five meters since the eruption and is expected to subside even more as the outpouring of mud leaves a deep crater behind. Indonesian government officials are currently pursuing a plan to divert the mud into the sea through large plastic pipes and dredges, a plan which has alarmed environmentalists. More than 12,000 people have been forced from their homes by the disaster, and at least 11 people were killed last week in a gas pipeline explosion triggered by the mudflow. Residents have complained that neither PT Lapindo Brantas nor the Java government have done much to stop the mudflow or help displaced residents. According to Al Jazeera, PT Lapindo is a subsidiary of Indonesia's second largest publicly traded energy company, which is controlled by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, the senior cabinet minister of the "people's welfare."

Element List will be undergoing a few changes over the next few weeks. For one thing, we're looking for some hired help in reviewing new and cool science websites. If you're interested in earning a little extra money, send us a brief, 150-300 word review of a science website that you particularly enjoy or find useful in your research. We will also consider below-the-radar science news items. If we like your blog article, we'll pay one or two beers worth, depending on length, and include a byline with a link back to you. Send submissions to info@e lementlist.com.

Tonegawa Steps Down as Director - Susumu Tonegawa, Nobel Laureate and director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, has stepped down as director following a months-long uproar over his refusal to accept a young, female rising neuroscience star, Alla Karpova, as a colleague for competitive reasons. Eleven MIT professors wrote a letter of complaint to the university president accusing Professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova, saying that "he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her." Karpova declined the MIT offer and is now at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Crescent City, California Hit by Kuril Quake Tsunami - According to geologists, Crescent City harbor happens to lie in an area where waves from the Pacific are focused and amplified to create larger waves. While ocean waves generated by the magnitude 8.1 Kuril Islands earthquake last week didn't reach to more than 23 inches in the western Pacific, the tsunami sent by the quake caused extensive damage, destroying docks and tearing boats from their tethers in Crescent City, where waves crested to 6 feet moving at 30 miles an hour. The tsunami arrived 6 hours after the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska cancelled the tsunami warning for the U.S. Pacific coast.

Robot Teaches Itself to Walk and Respond to Injury - Cornell researchers have developed a four-legged robot that learns how to control itself in a new environment and adapt to changes. "The machine does not have a single model of itself -- it has many, simultaneous, competing, different, candidate models. The models compete over which can best explain the past experiences of the robot."

Microsoft Photosynth - Microsoft made something cool. No, really. See how 2-D pictures can be combined to create 3-D images in a volume. Now mash it up with Flickr and Google Earth. My head just exploded.

MIT Whiteboard Brings Drawings to Life - Watch MIT Professor Randall Davis as he draws a car on a ramp using Sketch Recognition. The computer-linked whiteboard understands that he's drawn something with wheels on a slope and animates the car rolling down the slope under the force of gravity. Even drawing the wheel axis slightly off-center makes the car wobble on its way down. Physics professors and engineers will love this tool if/when it comes to market.

Make a Lego Rocket Launcher - This isn't your garden variety rocket launcher. It's a "laser target-finding, self-reloading, multi-shot rotary rocket launcher." The site has videos of the rocket launcher in action as well as CAD renderings and the software file used to program the launcher.

Graphical Multiplication - Here's a cute multiplication trick. Multiply any two numbers by drawing straight lines for each numeral first diagonally down to the right for the first number and then down to the left for the second number. Then add up the points of intersection. The video shows a special trick for carrying over numbers greater than nine.

Smith Magazine is all about helping you get your story out. Of course, to get started, it's helpful to know exactly which tools are available for you to get your story out on the web, which, let's face it, is the only medium that really matters anymore. So which tools are best and also free or cheap? Well, Smith mag has put together a handly little DIY Media Toolbox, which is essentially a guided tour of all the most popular blogging and networking sites in use today. Aside from the obvious sites like MySpace and YouTube, there are others such as LiveJournal for networking, iFilm for videos, Newsvine for news, Deviantart for art, and Moveable Type for blogging. The list includes about 30 sites with descriptions that are complete enough to help you decide which ones might be best for you. (Image by *rufftoon from Deviantart.)

It's that time of year again when grad students are nearing the finish line on their theses and searching for *gasp* a real job. If you haven't lined up a job or post-doc yet, check out the new Science Jobs section on Element List. We've compiled a bunch of great science job websites from dedicated science job listings (Scienteur, APS Careers) and science magazine job classifieds (The Scientist Careers), to job boards from major science research labs (Lucent/Bell Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, NIH). We're adding new science job listings sites all the time. If you don't see a favorite site of yours, send us a tip.