A story to make you feel good about people

Guest Post by Frank Barry: Your Network Matters: Fatcyclist Raises Over 135K in 8 Days:
[Via Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Note from Beth: I’m always excited to see inspiring examples of personal fundraising and the dollars raised have come a long way since my first experiment in 2006, a testament to how much more connected we are and the rise of popularity of this technique. I hope to celebrate my birthday in January with some sort of personal fundraiser/fundraiser to support Cambodian kids (hint, hint) and scanning for ideas.

Personal Fundraising, Social Media and Friends Asking Friends all converge to make an incredible impact!

A Cycling Blogger @fatcyclist sent the Manager of Lance Armstrong’s racing team @johanbruyneel a resume(joking) as if he were applying for a job. You see, @fatcyclist wants to be a professional cyclist and who better to help him than the manager of Lance Armstrong’s racing team? That said, @fatcyclist didn’;t think there was a chance on earth Johan Bruyneel would ever see it.

But, wouldn’t you know it, Bruyneel did see it! What transpired from there is pretty incredible. Bruyneel offered a friendly challenge – on Twitter and on his blog.

If @fatcyclist (pic left) raised $10K for World Bicycle Relief (WBR) and $10K for Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) @johanbruyneel would fly @fatcyclist to Cycling Camp on Dec. 13. And, if he raised $25K in a week, Trek would give him a sweet road bike (a $10K value). Pretty amazing stuff, eh? The story only gets better from here.

In 3 days @fatcyclist raised about $50K. In 5 days he raised over $100K. He used social media (blogging/Twitter) and Blackbaud’s personal fundraising tools (Friends Asking Friends) to pull off this incredible achievement. Without the ability to quickly connect and mobilize his his network to give this wouldn’t have been possible.

The challenge is continuing to grow. You can follow the story at www.fatcyclist.com, or you can just go join the people making it happen by donating here or here.

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Read the whole post. Over $100K raised! This is something that few non-profits really seem to get. It really only works if your network is already in place. The thing to remember is that many people what to help. This approach empowers them to take some actions.

Because not only would this not have happened without the network fatcyclist enabled, it was also possible because Bruyneel made an imaginative offer. His creative response generated everything. These sorts of bottom-up contests mat be more important in the long run than the normal top-down contest.

Technorati Tags: Non-Profit

Contests for social good

What Lessons Will Pepsi Learn About Crowdsourcing for Social Good from Chase Bank Contest Fail?:
[Via Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Pepsi is taking a bold move. It’s not spending money on Super Bowl ads for Pepsi beverages. Instead, Pepsi is using the money for lethal generosity through its Pepsi Refresh Project, a crowdsourced cause marketing effort to give away $20 million in grants to help revamp communities.

Rather than donating the money to nonprofits through a traditional corporate responsibility grant program, Pepsi will jump on the online contest bandwagon. Pepsi will invite “applicants” to submit big ideas to change the world and then ask a crowd of Pepsi Fans to vote on them. Pepsi will have contests every month for 10 months beginning Jan. 13.

According to a post in GigaOm, The Pepsi Refresh Project will award $5,000, $25,000, $50,000 and $250,000 to individuals and organizations that turn good ideas into projects that make a difference. The grant categories will be:

• Health
• Arts & Culture
• Food & Shelter
• The Planet
• Neighborhoods
• Education

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This is a really great discussion of the pitfalls of online contests for non-profits. There can be great collaborations between for-profit corporations and non-profits but it has to be done in a way the supports both missions, not just one.

That can be tricky without a lot of openness and transparency, something many corporations are have=ing a tricky time dealing with. It is great to see some of these initial experiments in social giving through corporations. I think they will figure things out because using this sort of contest for marketing purposes can have a much greater impact than advertising on the Superbowl.

Technorati Tags: Non-Profit

More collaboration in biology

[Crossposted at A Man with a PhD]

by Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M
I’ve collected my data, now what do I do with it?:
[Via Bench Marks]

4-dimensional live cell imaging has gone from being a rare technique used only by cutting-edge laboratories to a mainstream method in use everywhere. While more and more labs are becoming comfortable with the equipment and protocols needed to collect imaging data, performing detailed analyses is often problematic. The application of computational image processing is still far from routine. Researchers need to determine which measurements are necessary and sufficient to characterize a system and they need to find the appropriate tools to extract these data. In Computational Image Analysis of Cellular Dynamics: A Case Study Based on Particle Tracking, Gaudenz Danuser and Khuloud Jaqaman introduce the basic concepts that make the application of computational image processing to live cell imaging data successful. As one of the featured articles in December’s issue of Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, it is freely accessible for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

The article is adapted from the new edition of Live Cell Imaging: A Laboratory Manual, now available from CSHL Press.

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My first year as a biochemistry graduate student, one of the classes simply dealt with the analytical technologies we would be using. Things like NMR, UV spectroscopy, circular dichroism, fluorescence and X-ray crystallography. They would help us understand the properties of isolated biological molecules

This paper gives a great view of some of the new analytical approaches that examine entire living cells, not just isolated molecules. Now it looks like students will also have to get some firm understanding of image analysis. There will be some really interesting results from these sorts of technologies. The conclusions provide insights into the promise and the problems:

Computational image analysis is a complex yet increasingly central component of live cell imaging experiments. Much has to be done to make these techniques useful for cell biological investigation. First, algorithms must be transparent, not necessarily at the level of the code but in terms of their sensitivity to changing image quality and the effect that control parameters have on the output. Second, the design of imaging experiments must be tightly coupled to the design of the analysis software. All too often, images are taken without careful consideration of the subsequent analysis and are forwarded to the computer scientist to retrieve information from the images. To avoid these problems, communication must be initiated early on, and experiments must be designed with the appreciation that data acquisition and analysis are equivalent components. Third, software development and application require careful controls, as is customary for molecular cell biology experiments. This article provides a brief introduction to the ideas useful for implementing such controls. Hopefully, the cell biological literature will include a more extensive discussion of the measures taken to substantiate the validity of results from image analysis. On the other hand, manual image analysis should no longer be an option. As discussed in this article, manual analyses fall short in consistency and completeness, two essential criteria underlying the validity of a scientific model derived from image data.

While the results can be amazing, there needs to be close collaboration between the different researchers involved. Because very few people will have all the expertise necessary for success. This tight coupling of researchers with vastly different backgrounds and focus (i.e. cell biology and bioinformatics) is a relative new aspect of modern biological research.

There may be slowing of this coupling in some labs but the successful results by those that can accomplish this type of collaboration will rapidly overtake those who take a slower course. As I mentioned below, large collaborations may be a big part of the published record as we move forward.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media

We are broken but we always fix ourselves

Views: Don’t blame Obama on healthcare

[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn’t gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America’s political system is broken.

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Perhaps it takes a view from the outside to see the truth. Currently, our political system is broken. That is, in my view, partly due to the current restructuring of both political parties. We are going through one of those periodic realignments of the coalitions that make up each party.

When we have done this in the past, there are often many, many years of fits and starts, forward steps and big steps back, as we finally work our way to creating the political will to actually solve the problem.

But we always have worked our way through, fixed the ‘broken’ system and moved forward rapidly. I hope we have the time to do that now.

So much for cooling

This decade ‘warmest on record’:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

The first decade of this century is “by far” the warmest since instrumental records began, latest assessments show.

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Frankly, this may be as much cheery picking as using 1998 as the start year to make it look like things are cooling. A difference is that starting at a decade is not tied to getting a specific end result. That is there is nothing tying 2000 to any particular global temperature.

The main thing is that the last 10 years continues the sam trend as the last 20 and the last 30 and pretty much the last 100. SAo it is a pretty robust number.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

From 2.37 to 2.32

Views: An affordable truth

[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

History shows that cap and trade, a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems, does work.

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Paul Krugman brings up a very good point that many people forget. Acid rain was brought under control by a cap and trade approach to sulfur emissions. We no longer here about acid rain because this approach worked.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

The doom and gloom of some people would seem to be misplaced. Their projection of huge costs is not really borne out by other estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The reduction in GDP by 2050 would equal about 0.05 percent, dropping it from an annual growth rate of 2.37% to 2.32% between now and 2050. Recessions affect GDP by full percentage points.

Cap and trade seems like an easy thing to do.

Finding solutions

Christian Science Monitor: One reason why California needs to adapt to climate change

[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

Just after posting, yesterday, on California’s big push to get ready to cope with climate change, I learned that at the Christian Science Monitor freelancer Douglas Fox had written a nicely complementary story: California’s sinking delta.

The story is not so much about anthropogenic climate change, but anthropo-biogeomorphological change. The huge San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta at the top and east side of San Francisco Bay, the confluence of the state’s two primary drainages, is a labyrinth of diked islands that are the opposite of standard-issue islands. These patches of dry land stick down from the water. And they are getting lower. Oxidation and microbial consumption of drying peat, Fox explains at length, does that. The place exhales CO2 and gets more vulnerable to rising sea levels all the time, he also explains at length.

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We will be seeing more and more of this type of thing. The sooner we can find good solutions the better off we will be.

Hear scientists talk about climate change

by chrispearson72

To What Degree: What Science is Tellifont-size: medium; color: #999999;”>NSF News]

What is science telling us about climate change? Leading climate change experts discuss one of the most complex scientific puzzles ever to confront humankind.

More at /news/special_reports/degree/water.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_51

This is an NSF News item.

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The link has some really good videos. When someone asks a basic quesiton oabout climate change, snd them here. There are some really engaging researchers in the videos.

Richard Alley from Penn State gives a great intro to “How do we know the earth is warming?” along with several others. There is also a nice discussion of the water cycle. All done with very nicely.

DNA and fish

Wall St. Journal, others: DNA sleuths track down fish poachers

[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

In today’s Wall Street Journal Science Journal column Robert Lee Hotz provides an expansive look at the power of DNA typing to connect wild-caught game, whether fish (his focus, mainly) or bush meat to the creature from which a given filet, chop, or steady was butchered. He starts off with tuna and sushi, with pertinence not only to whether a given piece of uncooked fish is what the seller says it is, but to whether if might be from an endangered blue fin or other endangered tuna. The piece goes on to provide readers a taste for the much broader, rapid collection of DNA databases for all sort of creatures large or small and wild. Such DNA barcodes, he writes, are useful not only for helping to police the trade in endangered species, but as a tool for public health as well. They can even tell which birds are being sucked through jet engines.

His enterprising, top-down look comes close on the heels of another, much narrower bit of related news inspired by a journal report and, more important, a press release. The last few days has seen a number of outlets reporting the use of DNA barcodes to trace the origin of sharks – in this case species of hammerhead sharks – whose fins have helped supply the market for shark fin soup.

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The newest DNA sequencing technologies can have some real impacts outside of the human genome. These are just a few examples. I expect such DNA tagging will become quite important in a lot of the food supplying our communities.

Green chemistry is worth a look

Cloudy with a chance of toxics: How climate change is increasing our vulnerability to chemical pollution:
[Via Climate Progress]

This guest post is by Elizabeth Grossman, author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry and High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. She writes about environmental and science issues for the Washington Post, Salon, Mother Jones, the Nation, Grist, and other publications from Portland, Oregon. One of the book’s jacket quotes is from The great environmental writer and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben: “There are enough environmental problems that seem insoluble. Elizabeth Grossman has given us this chronicle of a field with a bright future, the green chemistry that will replace the crude methods of the 19th century with the smart ones of the 21st. She tells us how it could happen. We should listen carefully!“

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Read the entire post to get an idea of just what climate change may do to the spread of environmental hazards. It is not a pretty picture but there is hope.

Hope is an important message since many people seem to delight in doom and gloom. IN fact, this is a chance to change things for the better, such as kicking our foreign oil fixation.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Health