Today on "Express Yourself" Teen Radio - me - being interviewed about #Microbes & #OpenScience

Just a little self-centered plug.  I was interviewed recently for Express Yourself! | VoiceAmerica™ teen radio show.  The teens interviewing me included Henna Hundal who worked in my lab this summer as an intern on our "Seagrass Microbiome" project. See a post from Cassie Ettinger about Henna's work.  Also see:

Now watching our brilliant high school student Henna Hundal present about her summer project pic.twitter.com/WjlnkEuwuo
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) July 31, 2014

It was a fun interview and I love the idea of teens doing a science radio show.   From their site

Science is everywhere. From the stars that light the night sky to the intricate patterns on a butterfly’s wings, science is at play in all parts of our world and is continually making our lives so great. Hosts Henna Hundal and Courtney Chung discuss how science shapes our perspective on life from cell phones to lawn mowers, from cures for diseases to prosthetic limbs. Global Youth Talk reporter, Ryan Sim, talks about science careers in the United Nations, and how this international community is looking at science innovation to create solutions for the next generation. Special guest Dr. Jonathan Eisen,a Full Professor at the University of California, Davis, with appointments in the UC Davis Genome Center, the School of Medicine, and the College of Biological Sciences focuses on communities of microbes and how they provide new functions - to each other or to a host. Dr. Eisen is entertaining with his study systems of boiling acid pools, surface ocean waters, agents of many diseases, and the microbial ecosystems in and on plants and animals. In Health with Henna, Henna Hundal reports on how we can prevent the negative effects of prolonged sitting. It’s important to take those “stretch breaks” every hour. Whether it’s writing scientific articles, thoughtful science reporting, or even talking about science on the radio, integrating humanities with science is key to reaching a mass audience.

So - I recommend everyone listen ...12 noon Pacific Time on VoiceAmerica Kids Channel. Express Yourself! | VoiceAmerica™


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Personalized Medicine World Conference 2015: 55 speakers 7 of which are women #YAMMM #StemWomen

Well, umm, Ralph Snyderman, despite the email invitation I will not be attending PMWC 2015 Silicon Valley.  Why not?  Well how about the fact that you have 55 speakers listed, only 7 of which are women.

Previous year's meetings are not much better.  For example, for the 2014 Meeting in Silicon Valley the Track 1 session (which they call the premier session or something like that) has a ratio of 52:5 Male:Female.

#YAMMM Alert: Drug Discovery and Therapy World Congress, a meeting made for @realDonaldTrump & other men

Note - see update at bottom of post

Elizabeth Bik sent me a link to this meeintg: DRUG DISCOVERY & THERAPY WORLD CONGRESS 2015 with a comment about the ratio of males to females in the keynote speakers.  And it is painful.  Of the plenary and keynote speakers, 15 are male and 1 is female.  Below I show pics of the plenary and keynote speakers:

Plenary and Keynote Speakers at Drug Discovery and Thearpy World Congress

Female Plenary and Keynote Speakers at Drug Discovery and Thearpy World Congress

Two bonus people who could have been giving keynote talks but who actually are not.

The gender bias at this meeting puts into perspective the push by the NIH to get drug researchers to inlcude more female subjects in their studies.  See for example, Why Are All the Lab Rats Boys? NIH Tells Drug Researchers to Stop Being Sexist Pigs.  Here is a thought, maybe we can get some of these speakers to cancel speaking at the meeting and also maybe we can get nobody to attent the meeting.  Sigh.  Yet another mostly male meeting.  Also known as "YAMMM".

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UPDATE October 14, 2014.

Well, this is one of the strangest and lamest things I have seen associated with a conference in a while.  Elizabeth Bik just emailed me to show me an invite she received to the "Global Biotechnology Congress 2015."  And here is the bizarre thing.  It is at the same time as the Drug Discovery meeting discussed here.  Same place.  Same speakers.  It is apparently the same meeting with a new name.

Same bad gender ratio of course too.

Did they do this to avoid people discovering my post about the awful gender ratio?  I don't know but seems like it might be so.  What a joke.  Well, I can guarantee people will associated this meeting name with the previous one.  

Triclosan in toothpaste: potential risks are not a "rumor" as arrogant Colgate official argues, but are something to worry about

Triclosan in my toothpaste (and maybe yours too)

I was reading some posts of a friend and went down a bit of a rabbit hole that led me to a place that did not make me happy.

First I saw a post about some issues with Crest Toothpastes containing polyethylene: Dentist calls Crest toothpaste dangerous; Now P&G changing ingredients.  This seemed a bit disturbing.  But then I saw a "Related Link": Shoppers Ditching Colgate Total Amid Triclosan Fears.  And I thought - holy cra*## - really? I had no idea triclosan was in toothpaste.  And why did I react strongly?  Well triclosan, which is antimicrobial agent, though it has it's potential benefits, has some potential risks associated with it's antibacterial activity (see also this discussion from the EU).  What are these possible risks?  Risks like increasing the frequency and spread of antimicrobial resistance.  And risks like messing with microbial ecosystems.

And due to these potential risks, I have been blogging and writing and complaining about the use of triclosan in various building materials for some time now.  For example

Potentially important paper on need to regulate Triclosan http://t.co/eZaqq9mjQK - publishing behind a paywall is idiotic #ShameOnACS
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 8, 2014

And also see:

• Studying – not wantonly killing – the microbes around us and the rise of the “microbiology of the built environment”
• A disturbing trend – casual and reckless use of antimicrobial agents in building materials.

Story Behind the Paper: Comparative Analysis of Functional Metagenomic Annotation and the Mappability of Short Reads (by Rogan Carr and Elhanan Borenstein)

Here is another post in my "Story Behind the Paper" series where I ask authors of open access papers to tell the story behind their paper.  This one comes from Rogan Carr and Elhanan Borenstein.  Note - this was crossposted at microBEnet.  If anyone out there has an open access paper for which you want to tell the story -- let me know.

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We’d like to first thank Jon for the opportunity to discuss our work in this forum. We recently published a study investigating direct functional annotation of short metagenomic reads that stemmed from protocol development for our lab. Jon invited us to write a blog post on the subject, and we thought it would be a great venue to discuss some practical applications of our work and to share with the research community the motivation for our study and how it came about.

Our lab, the Borenstein Lab at the University of Washington, is broadly interested in metabolic modeling of the human microbiome (see, for example our Metagenomic Systems Biology approach) and in the development of novel computational methods for analyzing functional metagenomic data (see, for example, Metagenomic Deconvolution). In this capacity, we often perform large-scale analysis of publicly available metagenomic datasets as well as collaborate with experimental labs to analyze new metagenomic datasets, and accordingly we have developed extensive expertise in performing functional, community-level annotation of metagenomic samples. We focused primarily on protocols that derive functional profiles directly from short sequencing reads (e.g., by mapping the short reads to a collection of annotated genes), as such protocols provide gene abundance profiles that are relatively unbiased by species abundance in the sample or by the availability of closely-related reference genomes. Such functional annotation protocols are extremely common in the literature and are essential when approaching metagenomics from a gene-centric point of view, where the goal is to describe the community as a whole.

However, when we began to design our in-house annotation pipeline, we pored over the literature and realized that each research group and each metagenomic study applied a slightly different approach to functional annotation. When we implemented and evaluated these methods in the lab, we also discovered that the functional profiles obtained by the various methods often differ significantly. Discussing these findings with colleagues, some further expressed doubt that that such short sequencing reads even contained enough information to map back unambiguously to the correct function. Perhaps the whole approach was wrong!

We therefore set out to develop a set of ‘best practices’ for our lab for metagenomic sequence annotation and to prove (or disprove) quantitatively that such direct functional annotation of short reads provides a valid functional representation of the sample. We specifically decided to pursue a large-scale study, performed as rigorously as possible, taking into account both the phylogeny of the microbes in the sample and the phylogenetic coverage of the database, as well as several technical aspects of sequencing like base-calling error and read length. We have found this evaluation approach and the results we obtained quite useful for designing our lab protocols, and thought it would be helpful to share them with the wider metagenomics and microbiome research community. The result is our recent paper in PLoS One, Comparative Analysis of Functional Metagenomic Annotation and the Mappability of Short Reads.

The performance of BLAST-based annotation of short reads across the bacterial and archaeal tree of life using the 'top gene' protocol. See the manuscript for full details. Figure and text adapted from: Carr R, Borenstein E (2014) Comparative Analysis of Functional Metagenomic Annotation and the Mappability of Short Reads. PLoS ONE 9(8): e105776 

Notes from 2007 for a blog post I should have written: How many microbial cells in humans?

Well sometimes you just screw up.  In 2007 I attended some planning meetings for the human microbiome project (see for example A human microbiome program? a post I wrote from one of the meetings in 2007).  And at those meetings I kept asking one question.  Where did this "fact" everyone kept citing that there were "10 times as many microbial cells in the human body as there were human cells" come from?  I could not find a citation.  So I started taking some notes for a blog post about this.  Here are those notes:

Wikipedia linkOnline textbook hereSears paper from Arizona site. She discusses only gut bacteria and cites a Gordon paper from 2001.
Seems to not be from this paper but really from here:
This in turn is not from there but apparently here

But, alas I got distracted.  And I did keep asking people - where did this "fact" come from.  And most people just brushed me off (and probably thought I was a bit of a crank ...). And nobody had a good answer.  Well, I was both pleased and sad (because I should have done it) to see Is your body mostly microbes? Actually, we have no idea by Peter Andrey Smith in the Boston Globe who addresses this issue in much much more detail that I ever could have done.  Everyone who works on the human microbiome and who is interested in "facts" and how they can get misreported should read this.  As a side note, Smith reports in the article that this is even given as a fact in Ted talks.  Sadly mine was one of them.  This is despite the fact (yes, the fact) that I swore to myself that I would NOT say that in my talk since I have been such a crank about this issue at meetings.  OMG - such truisms are so pervasive that even someone who actively questioned the truism still used it.  Uggh.  Oh well.  I really should have finished that draft post.

Don't forget to positively highlight meetings w/ "good" gender ratio of presenters

As many know, I spend a decent amount of effort critiquing conferences that have poor speaker diversity (mostly focus on gender ratio).  Well I am also trying to start calling out in a positive way those meetings that do a good job with speaker diversity. And here is one: 2014 Xenopus Genetics meeting in Pacific Grove.  I was pointed to it in an email that was in response to a Tweet I posted (not sure if I have permission to say who this was from - will post if they say it is OK). (UPDATE 9/20 - it was Ian Quigley).

See meeting w/ severely bad speaker gender ratio but don't feel comfortable posting?send me details & I will post phylogenomics@me.com
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) September 19, 2014

From what I compute - the ratio was 30:22 male: female.  I do not know what the ratio of the "pool" of speakers is but regardless, having 42% female speakers is a more even ratio than I have seen for most life sciences meetings.  So they deserve some props for this.

Female speakers highlighted in yellow.  Male in green.  

Keynote Lecture: Rebecca Heald

Special Lectures from John Gurdon and Marc Kirschner

Invited Speakers

Enrique Amaya, University of Manchester

Ruchi Bajpai, University of Southern California

A distasteful & disgraceful "Are there limits to evolution?" meeting at the University of Cambridge #YAMMM

Well, I saw this Tweet the other day

Another for @phylogenomics's list of YAMMMs (Yet Another Mostly Male Mtg). Ratio = 1F speaker to 23M speakers. http://t.co/qgEfwtBS2B
— Hopi Hoekstra (@hopihoekstra) September 16, 2014

And though there was a bit of a discussion on Twitter I felt I had to follow up with a blog post. When I saw the post I was at a conference (Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes) where I could get Twitter access but for some reason very little web access. So I could not dig around until now (I am home). 

This meeting is a complete disgrace and an embarassment for the field of evolutionary biology, for the University of Cambridge which is hosting the meeting, and for the Templeton Foundation which is sponsoring it.

Why do I say this? Well, pretty simple actually. The meeting site lists the Invited Keynote speakers for the meeting.  Notice anything?  How about I help you by bringing all the pictures together.

Notice anything now?  How about I help you some more by masking out the men and not the women.

Impressive no?  25 speakers - 23 of them male.  I guess that means there are no qualified female speakers who coudl discuss something about evolution right?  It would be worth reading "Fewer invited talks bu women in evolutionary biology symposia" to get some context.  What an incredible, disgusting, distasteful and disgraceful meeting.  

I recommend to everyone who was considering going to this meeting - skip it.  Also consider writing to the University of Cambirdge and the Templeton Foundation to express your thoughts about the meeting.  This certainly is a fine example of Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM).  Well, maybe I should word that differently - this is a disgusting example of a YAMMM.  

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For more on this and related issues

Posts on Women in STEM

Also see

See meeting w/ severely bad speaker gender ratio but don't feel comfortable posting?send me details & I will post phylogenomics@me.com
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) September 19, 2014

Everything You Wanted to Know about the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting #LAMG14

The Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting, which happens every other year, is starting tonight.  I love this meeting.  No bias here since I am now a co-organizer.  But I really love this meeting.  I am posting here some background information about the meeting for those interested.  We will be live tweeting the meeting using the hashtag #LAMG14.  This years program is here.

Posts of mine about previous meetings

• March 02, 2014: Save the dates / preliminary program for Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting
• July 11, 2012: Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes 2012 #Genomes #Microbes #Mountains #Lake #Fun #Wine #MustGo
• September 22, 2012: Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting 2012 Speaker Gender Ratio #LAMG12
• September 22, 2012: Storify for Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG12 Meeting
• October 28, 2010: The Story behind the Meeting: Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes 2010 
• September 14, 2008: It's Miller Time - Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Conference -- about to begin
• September 16, 2008: Lake arrowhead notes - UPDATED
• September 29, 2006: Genomics Education highlighted at 14th Annual International Meeting on Microbial Genomics

Blog posts by others

• December 23, 2012: Srijak Bhatnagar: Lessons from 2012: Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes
• September 21, 2008: Morgan Langille Review of Arrowhead Conference

Programs and notes from past meetings

• 1998_LakeArrowhead notes
• 1998_Arrowhead
• 2000_Arrowhead
• 2002 Lake_Arrowhead
• 2004  meeting notes and booklet
• 2006_Arrowhead
• 2008_Arrowhead
• 2010_Arrowhead
• 2012 Lake Arrowhead Booklet

Meeting Web Sites

• Microbial Genomics - ARROWHEAD 2012

I have uploaded slides from my previous presentations at the meeting

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Jonathan Eisen @phylogenomics talk for #LAMG12 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "The Importance of History" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2010 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "Genomic Encyclopedia" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2008 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "Enodsymbiont Genomics" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2006 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "Phylogenomics of Microbes" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2004 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "Phylogenomics of Microbes" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2002 from Jonathan Eisen

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Jonathan Eisen talk on "Phylogenomics of DNA repair" at Lake Arrowhead Small Genomes Meeting 2000 from Jonathan Eisen

Fun read of the day: On whimsy, jokes, and beauty: can scientific writing be enjoyed?

This is such a fun paper: On whimsy, jokes, and beauty: can scientific writing be enjoyed? by Stephen Heard in Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 7: 64–72, 2014  I found out about it in an email from Heard, who sent it to me because he had earlier commented on a blog post I had written: The best writing in science papers part 1: Vladimir Nabokov in Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera).

Anyway - enough about me - what about this paper?  It has so many nuggets of interest I am not sure which to highlight so I will just go through some of it.  Oh - and it is published with a Creative Commons Attribution license (yay).

Abstract: While scientists are often exhorted to write better, it isn’t entirely obvious what “better” means. It’s uncontroversial that good scientific writing is clear, with the reader’s understanding as effortless as possible. Unsettled, and largely undiscussed, is the question of whether our goal of clarity precludes us from making our writing enjoyable by incorporating touches of whimsy, humanity, humour, and beauty. I offer examples of scientific writing that offers pleasure, drawing from ecology and evolution and from other natural sciences, and I argue that enjoyable writing can help recruit readers to a paper and retain them as they read. I document resistance to this idea in the scientific community, and consider the objections (well grounded and not) that may lie behind this resistance. I close by recommending that we include touches of whimsy and beauty in our own writing, and also that we work to encourage such touches in the writing of others.

OK - the title would have drawn me in anyway but the abstract definitely had me.

If scientific writers aren’t sure how to write better, it isn’t for lack of advice. Dozens of guidebooks discuss form, style, and goals in scientific writing (e.g., Montgomery 2003, Davis 2005, Day and Gastel 2006, Katz 2006, Matthews and Matthews 2007, Rogers 2007, Harmon and Gross 2010, Hofmann 2010, Pechenik 2010, Greene 2013, Heard unpubl.).

OK - I am going to have to look at some of these.

Heard documents a bit of a spat between Sprat and Boyle from the 1660s regarding scientific writing.  I especially like the Boyle quote:

To affect needless rhetorical ornaments in setting down an experiment...were little less improper than...to paint the eyeglasses of a telescope...in which even the most delightful colours cannot so much please the eye as they would hinder the sight...And yet I approve not that dull and insipid way of writing, which is practiced by many...for though a philosopher need not be solicitous that his style should delight his reader with his floridness, yet I think he may very well be allowed to take a care that it disgust not his reader by its flatness...Though it were foolish to colour...the glasses of telescopes, yet to gild...the tubes of them may render them most acceptable to the users (Boyle 1661:11-12, spelling and punctuation modern- ized).

Heard then goes through some different aspects of good scientific writing

• Sightings (1): Playfulness in the scientific literature
• Sightings (2): Beauty

Also - he then doscusses pushback against the "notion that whimsy, jokes, and beauty can have a place in our scientific literature." which I have also seen in many contexts.

He ends with suggestions and I quote the whole section with some highlights:

If you write papers that are crystal clear and thus effortless to read, you’ll have achieved the primary goal of scientific writing and your work will be among the best of our literature. But if you want to reach for even more, if you agree with me that we can also offer our readers some pleasure in reading, what can you do? To begin, you can try to write with small touches of whimsy, humanity, humour, and beauty—without, of course, compromising clarity; and even knowing that sometimes, reviewers will make you take them out. I am not suggesting writing in which art shares the stage equally with content (as can be true in the lay literature). Rather, the goal that’s within our reach is clear, functional writing punctuated with occasional nuggets of playfulness or glints of beauty—to extend Boyle’s metaphor, not a telescope of solid gold but one lightly gilded. 

You can also work to encourage pleasure in what your colleagues write, in two complementary ways. First, when you review manuscripts, you can suppress the reflex telling you to question any touches of whimsy, humour, or beauty that you find; you can even (gently) suggest some be put in. Second, you can announce your admiration of writing that has given you pleasure. Announce your admiration to the writers who crafted the passage, to editors who might be considering its fate, and to students or colleagues who might read it. If we choose to, we can change our culture to deliver, and value, pleasure along with function in our writing.

This is a must read paper.  And I really wish more people would endorse the idea that scientific writing can include more than just science.  Of course, there are many who already endorse this notion but for those who do not - give it a try.

Kudos to Tedmed for the gender ratio of speakers for this year's event

Well done Tedmed.

Here are the speaker pages below.  Notice anything?

The gender ratio of speakers is actually well balanced.  Well done Tedmed.  Well done.

International Symposium on Subsurface Microbiology - where men tell us about deep things

Just saw this Tweet:

ISSM, a conference with no female plenary speakers. http://t.co/r3zUX8lEpt #fail cc @phylogenomics @pgirguis
— Jen Biddle (@subsurface_life) September 9, 2014

This refers to this meeting: Call for Abstracts for 2014 Ninth International Symposium on Subsurface Microbiology, Pacific Grove California

The plenary speakers for this meeting are all men

• Peter Girguis
• Terry Hazen
• Rainer Meckenstock
• Lars Nielsen
• Aaron Packman
• Karsten Pedersen
• Timothy Scheibe
• Jack Schijven

The last meeting was in 2011 and it was not much better - with one female keynote speaker.

• Andreas Kappler
• Karsten Pedersen
• Christian Griebler
• Ian Head
• Frank Löffler
• Babara Sherwood-Lollar
• Bo Barker Jørgensen
• Ken Takai
• Kai-Uwe Hinrichs
• Tori Hoehler

Apparently, only men can talk about deep things.  Fun times.

Story behind the paper: Bonnie Baxter on "A tale of salt and gender" #STEMWomen #Halophiles

After posting A tale of salt and gender: participation of women in halophile research I sent the post to Bonnie Baxter, one of the authors of the article I discussed and I asked if she would be interested in writing a guest post about the "Story Behind the Paper" (for which I have a whole series).  I am so so pleased that she said yes.  I have followed Bonnie's work for many years but this is her first guest post here.  I hope there will be more.  She is a wonderful and brilliant scientist and educator.

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Guest Post by Bonnie Baxter

Salty Sisters: The Women of Halophiles

Bonnie Baxter and Nina Gunde-Cimerman at the north arm of Great Salt Lake (2008)

I was drawn to the western US, the extreme landscapes, and ended up at the only liberal arts college in Utah. I had wanted a career doing science with undergraduates, and I set about exploring the microbiota of Great Salt Lake. Since few had studied this incredible spot, I quickly became the go-to person for studies on the lake, and these collaborations and grant projects eventually evolved into an organization I direct called Great Salt Lake Institute. We are dedicated to research, scholarship and education efforts on Great Salt Lake.

There had been no microbiology done on Great Salt Lake since 1979. This is why there was much excitement concerning our emerging data, and in 2004, I was invited to speak at the triennial International Halophiles conference in Slovenia. Halophiles are microbes that thrive at high-salt, and the people who study them maintain an interesting balance of field-work and lab work. I had been to large meeting on DNA repair, DNA replication, nucleases and the like, but I had never met a group who were centered on a theme that connected them around the planet. 

From my first Halophiles meeting (I’ve since attended 2007 in Colchester UK, 2010 in Beijing and 2013 at University of Connecticut), I felt an unusual level of support from the elders of this group. And I noticed that, unlike the NASA meetings or biochemistry meetings I attended, there seemed to be a nice balance of men and women. There were a group of folks who had participated for a long time, without a membership organization, and these people maintained the notion of mentoring in the field. It is this spirit that drew all of us younger folk to participate. 

Paperwork, paper pushing policies push people past pressure points

So I am going to make this simple here.  Paperwork at UC Davis is driving me batty these days.  One thing in particular does not make much sense to me. When I or anyone who works in my lab go on trips associated with work, we have to collect all the receipts for the trip and then these need to be submitted in an intemized way for reimbursement.  With a lot of people going on a lot of trips, this amounts to a lot of work for us, for my administrative assistant, for the UC Davis Genome Center administration, and for the UC administration.  At other places I have worked, and in other situations, people can get reimbursed using a per diem calculation.  Such calculations save an absurd amount of work for people even if they come with some "risks" such as people getting reimbursed for more than they actually spent.  Personally, I would take a 50% per diem to save everyone the trouble associated with all the reciepts and submitting them and checking them and such.

So - the reason I am writing is to ask - what happens at other institutions?  Does everyone have to submit all the receipts?  Or does anyone out there do per diems?

Nice letter to the editor in the Davis Enterprise taking on school district's anti-science tone

I assume many people heard about the recently released report from the American Academy of Pediatrics where they recommended high school classes start later in the morning than most do right now.  See for example: Let Them Sleep: AAP Recommends Delaying Start Times of Middle and High Schools to Combat Teen Sleep Deprivation.  And this report was covered in all sorts of newsy and bloggy places.   See for example, Amy Graff's article in SFGate and Deborah Netburn in the LA Times.  Overall, the argument presented by the AAP makes sense and seems supported by scientific fundings.  And they go through a lot of scientific reasons for their recommendations.

Alas, Winfred Roberson, superintendant of the Davis, CA schools (also known as the DJUSD) told the Davis Enterprise that the schools here would not be making any changes in response to this report:

“While DJUSD won’t be modifying start times, our role as an educational institution can be to find ways to support our students by giving them the tools that will help them to think through, make adjustments and prioritize their competing forces that may be cutting into the recommended sleep time,” Roberson said. “These are life skills we are helping to build that will help students to function even after graduation.”

And I had missed out on this quote, thankfully, but became aware of it when my wife showed me this letter by Steve Carlip in the Davis Enterprise today:  Don’t ignore the science Davis Enterprise.   I quote from it below:

The superintendent’s response, as reported in Tuesday’s Enterprise, was to simply ignore the science. Instead, he said, the schools will help student “build life skills” to “prioritize their competing forces that may be cutting into the recommended sleep time.” 

Really? The high school is going to teach students to control their circadian rhythms? It’s going to give them the “life skills” to regulate the timing of their bodies’ secretion of melatonin? It will educate them to overcome biological sleep-wake phase delay by sheer force of will?

He completely nailed it here.  I hope Winfred Roberson and the Davis School district rethink their attitude towards scientific studies.

The US Postal Service Cares (actually this was kind of a nice gesture)

Well, this is a new one for me and my family.  We got some mail today.  My wife called me over this evening to tell me and said "it might make something good for my blog".  But it was very strange. From the US Postal Service.  In a plastic bag and the bag read "We care ..." see below:

And inside of this was half of a piece of mail.  A card.  It felt very weird.  Like someone was censoring us but most likely some machine just ate the other half.

Front

Back

Add caption

They easily could have just tossed this once it got damaged.  Glad they did this.  Now, mind you, I still detest all their junk mail / bulk mail policies, but this was nice ..

Science Journal SPAM of the Week: the Journal of HIV/AIDS from Sci Forschen

Well, got this email this AM.  It is yet another spammy journal (I don't work on HIV/AIDS).  I particularly like the part where I am called an "eminent personality".

Dear Dr. Jonathan Eisen,

Greetings from the Journal of HIV/AIDS,

We take great delight in inviting you to join the Editorial Board for the Journal of HIV/AIDS , which is an open access, peer reviewed journal managed by Sci Forschen.  Ensuring quality and accuracy for every submitted article is the top most priority for Sci Forschen, and we genuinely believe that someone with the knowledge and experience, such as yourself, can really make a huge difference for us.

Journal of HIV/AIDS , publishes cutting edge research work submitted by scholars from all over the world, and we believe that your presence will polished up with the help of illustrious experts in research field.

We are always striving to involve eminent personalities like you and your standing in the global community makes us confident.

Kindly let us know your valuable response and acceptance if possible with in 48 hours.

Please kindly submit your following particulars to update in our journal website

1. Updated CV
2. Passport Size Photo
3. Short Biography
4. Research Interest

Looking forward for your valuable and soon response.

Regards,

Editorial Office
Sci Forschen Incorporation
913 Catkin Ct.
San Jose, CA 95128, USA.