I’ve told you about one kind of category fight, accusing someone of a bait-and-switch and this week I came across an excellent example of another one. A blogger who goes by the alias of Doctor Nerdlove wants to protect the category of Socially Awkward Men from incursions by people who are just assholes. In this case, the Socially Awkward Men have established themselves as a disabled class and asked for accommodation.

Charles Fillmore died in February. I only met the man once, briefly, but his work has been a great inspiration to me over the years, particularly frame semantics. Last week I came across this sign above, advertising a bar. The word “screwdriver” is ambiguous, because it can mean a hand tool to turn screws, or a drink made with vodka and orange juice. Fillmore’s frames help us to explore and understand that ambiguity.

The American linguist Lauren Hall-Lew, currently living in Edinburgh, was musing on Twitter recently about how both Scotch and Oriental are considered offensive when categorizing people, but not offensive when describing alcohol or rugs. Her main point is valid and very important: as I’ve discussed before, emotions can run very high when discussing how to categorize people, this is because so much more is at stake.

Even if you didn’t grow up in a hippie town like I did, you may very well like to eat natural foods. If I weren’t allergic I would eat natural chicken; everyone says it’s healthy, right? Not so fast!

This weekend the New York Times Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process. A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson.

Just a brief thought prompted by two, partly related, things streaming past my nose. Firstly Michael Nielsen discussed the views of Aristotle and Sunstein on collective intelligence. The thing that caught my attention was the idea that deliberation can make can make group functioning worse, leading to a collective decision that is muddled rather than actually identifying the best answer presented by members of the community.

This started out as a comment on Peter Murray-Rust’s response to my post and grew to the point where it seemed to warrant its own post.

More on the discussion of structured vs unstructured experiment descriptions. Frank has put up a description of the Minimal Information about a Neuroscience Investigation standard at Nature Precedings which comes out of the CARMEN project. Neil Saunder’s has also made some comments on the resistance amongst the lab monkeys to think about structure. Lots of good points here. I wanted to pick out a couple in particular; From Neil;

Frank Gibson of peanutbutter has left a long comment on my post about data models for lab notebooks which I wanted to respond to in detail. We have also had some email exchanges. This is essentially an incarnation of the heavyweight vs lightweight debate when it comes to tools and systems for description of experiments.

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing.