I Am Not What I Eat

Nutritional profileI usually don’t do online, or any other kind, of survey. But, an ad for the Nutriprofile personal nutritional profiling site in the weekend papers caught my eye. It was the accreditation by various academic bodies that caught my eye. Among them, the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition – London Metropolitan University, and Healthspan a dietary supplements company.

Admittedly, the presence of the commercial entry in the list, raised my suspicions a little, but we’ve all got to earn a living, so I thought I’d give it a go regardless. It was all fairly straightforward asking about my diet and lifestyle, weight and height, the usual things one would expect from a nutritional survey. The results were emailed to me as a link within about 15 hours. The promise was of a “24-page, scientifically validated, report that tells you how to meet your body’s nutritional needs totally and exactly.” I think they mean completely and precisely but let’s not quibble. Apparently, “The value to your future health is immeasurable.” Well, if it’s a measurable how can they measure it…oh yes, I wasn’t going to quibble.

The report, had it been in printed form, would no doubt have been nice and glossy, with lists and charts in red, amber, and green alerting me to various key areas of my diet and health that need fixing. However, various aspects of the nutritional analysis stood out as rather inconsistent right from the start. For instance, those green areas are meant to represent “adequate”. To many people that word has rather negative connotations implying either just enough or barely enough. Now, anyone taking the report seriously would see the green but read “adequate” and either be confused or feel that they had failed the test somehow and need to fix things. Green I would suggest would mean just fine, not merely adequate. There would be no need to get any more of this and no need to have any less of that.

Then there is the issue of the my fruit and veg intake. Well, I do like my veggies, but I am a meat eater too. I do like fruit, but don’t always get around to peeling the requisite number of citrus items or munching through quite enough apples etc to bring me up to my perfect 5 or more. That said, if we have Brussels sprouts for dinner, brocolli, asparagus or indeed almost any other veg, I generally have bigger portions of those. But, given that I got the green tab for every other aspect of my nutrition (with a couple of exceptions, more on that later), which means enough vitamins and minerals, I cannot quite understand why it matters if I don’t always have specifically five fruit and veg portions. More to the point, if I’ve somehow got adequate intake of vitamins and minerals but I’m not eating enough fruit and veg where are the majority coming from in the first place? One of the major issues with such a survey is that they failed to ask how big are my portions? Surely a big stack of fresh garden peas or runner beans, twice as big as someone else’s meagre portion of cauliflower counts for more not less.

Next up are the omega acids. It’s a trendy buzzword with lots of research grants hinging on it. The trouble is, there is only so much oil fish you can eat in a week unless you’re a real big fish fan and don’t mind the mess and household stench of cooking it more often. Not to mention the bioaccumulated pollutants, such as mercury, which they say are a problem with many oily fish and some of the predatory fish. So, I fall down on that score too. (Maybe I am doomed, after all). Incidentally, why is it we are not usually keen to eat land-based predators but are fine with piscine predators such as shark, swordfish etc? Is it a parasite problem perhaps?

Next, I was flashed amber for several mineral values, which raised my hackles too. Apparently, I have a risk of deficiency for copper (I get 1.14 milligrams, but apparently need 1 .2 mg). Hmmmm. I get 95% of an estimated recommended daily amount and they say I’m at risk of deficiency. How can they tell? Maybe I eat something only rarely that covers the deficit but that wasn’t mentioned in the initial survey.

Then there’s selenium. There is actually no definitive allowance for selenium. It is next to impossible to determine a person’s load of this element let alone figure out whether they have enough or not. We don’t yet know what “enough” is when it comes to selenium. Nevertheless the profile tells me I am at a deficiency risk because I only get 62 micrograms whereas I need 72 micrograms. Again, it’s marginal wouldn’t you say?

Other items on the list are shown as green for adequate, yet reading the figures, I would say rather than being adequate I am actually overdosing on them with my current diet. For instance, I’m taking in more than 1.5 g of phosphorus but their chart tells me I only need half a gram.

Similar, with the dreaded sodium, I’m ingesting 2624 mg, according to my inputs. This figure, incidentally, is far too precise a value for an estimate being given with four significant figures. Regardless, I should only have a maximum of 2400mg (two sig figs). So, I’m a pinch above the recommendation, but they never asked me about my blood pressure and that could be a major factor in whether I’m seriously overdosing on sodium or okay.

Finally, I don’t get enough fibre, what my grandmother used to call roughage, apparently. At a reported 13.4 g (I really don’t know where they get those three significant figures from) as opposed to a recommended 18g. I actually eat a huge bowl of porridge oats most working days, have sandwiches made with wholemeal bread at lunchtime, and generally leave the skins on potatoes, eat brown rice etc. But, more to the point, they didn’t ask me what size are my portions. They also have no idea how precisely I estimated my own intake of any given food. So, while such surveys might be fun and quick to do and can provide useful indicators of problem areas in your diet if you are seriously deficient, I think the detailed results should be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. Or maybe not, if you’ve got high blood pressure.

I’ve posted my personal results as a PDF on the web, if anyone is interested in comparing their results to mine, I’ll email the link, just let me know.

In What We Trust

In sci we trustNews headlines almost always deal in data-free absolutes. Take this recent strapline from an item on Australian news site: Drinking two or more colas a day – whether sweetened with sugar or an artificial sweetener – doubles your risk of chronic kidney disease, according to new research. And, at the time of writing, the media is full of the news that modern antidepressants don’t work, although the actual research papers on which such headlines are based will not be quite so definitive in their conclusions.

It is fairly typical of the many health stories that cross the news wires on a daily basis, if it isn’t artificial sweeteners, sugars, fat, and cholesterol, then it’s organic pollutants, prescription drugs, and electromagnetic radiation. The headlines seem inevitably to contrast starkly with the output of government and industry that seeks to quash our fears and to emphasise how doubling a tiny, tiny risk is no big deal.

It is not just health scares that are problematic. Similarly, we are repeatedly warned of the dangers of this or that behaviour, the effects on our lives of multifaceted issues, such as pollution, the changing climate.

It is difficult to disentangle the cause from the effect. Is the growing number of scare stories feeding a healthy public scepticism of technology or does it simply feed on a reluctance to trust technical expertise and science? It’s a problem for those in science and technology who face repeated impediments to their work that are more often than not based on unfounded qualms and misrepresented statistics.

There have been industrial accidents, of course, humans are indeed exposed to new chemicals, ecological systems do get harmed, and there are uncertainties about biological advances such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear power.

Writing in the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues (2008, 8, 132-146) social scientist Elisabeth Graffy and civil engineer Nathaniel Booth of the US Geological Survey, in Middleton, Wisconsin, argue that it should be possible to instil the public with renewed confidence in the validity of risk assessment as well as improve the outcomes of risk assessment. They suggest that this will require a reframing of risk research and communication so that scientific knowledge evolves in parallel with public understanding rather than the two being entirely disjointed. While the approach they propose is not likely to eliminate the type of see-saw headlines we see every day, it could have an effect on at least some issues.

Graffy and Booth report on a web-based platform that was developed to link experts and public discourse through shared information resources. Such a site “could simultaneously foster greater public awareness of the links between environmental and human health vulnerabilities, advances in scientific evaluation and assessment,” they explain, and lead to improved communication between the two. The prototype system, they add, was well received by scientists and public alike.

However, the researchers concede that there is much room for improvement in their web-based approach, if the goal is to reach the general public. In their experiment, it was the policy makers at different levels who got the most from it whereas the impact on general public users was mixed. The research of communications professors Craig Trumbo of Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Katherine McComas of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, reported in the same issue of the journal (2008, 8, 61-76) point out that there are many intrinsic difficulties in engaging the public with sci-tech matters, particularly when health or environmental risks are involved.

They have looked at how public trust of institutions, whether of governments, companies or other organisations affects the way in which people process information and perceive risk. Their data are based on US state health department investigations into 30 suspected cancer clusters. The researchers assessed trust for three information sources: state health departments, civic groups and the industries involved in each case.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trumbo and McComas found that when people have trust in the state health department’s information their perception of risk is lower, while trust of civic groups, often activist groups, is associated with the perception of greater risk.

But, the situation is not quite that clear cut. “The manner by which these associations may form is linked to the way that people process the information, ” Trumbo told Sciencebase, “Trust associated with civic groups, for example, is aligned with having to use a systematic strategy for information processing. This is a more effortful and involved processing form. Conversely, trust associated with industry or state sources is aligned with stronger heuristic information processing. This is a less effortful and more “rule of thumb” manner of thinking.”

“Trust is a precious commodity for those communicating risk and perhaps acutely so for industry and governmental risk communicators who are typically considered ‘less trustworthy’ sources,” the researchers say.

It could be that the underlying problem, the disparity between the purported trustworthiness of civic, state and industry sources involves public understanding of science, the scientific process, and what is scientific evidence and what is not. But it is also recognized that science itself is not a value-free enterprise and that in many contexts, especially cancer clusters, there is a high degree of uncertainty even for the scientists. In these contexts it is unlikely that there is much to be gained by making the assumption that if we might only educate people about science they will arrive at the correct opinion about risk. These contexts call for a balanced approach to risk communication that recognizes the key difference between data-free absolutes, pseudoscientific opinion, legitimate value-based non-expert reactions, and the role of a scientific approach in risk assessment, Trumbo explains.

In a follow-up article, I will be discussing my experience of asking for feedback on the issue of public trust in science on the business networking site LinkedIn. Watch this space, or better still subscribe to the Sciencebase newsfeed and ensure you don’t miss it. My item on Trust is now scheduled to post March 24, 2008.

YACJ – Nature Chemistry

April 2009 sees the launch of yet another chemistry journal, this one coming from Nature Publishing Group. It will, apparently, “provide a unique forum for the publication of high-quality research in all areas of chemistry.” Well, they would say that, they’re hardly going to tell us it’s a run-of-the-mill publication offering tedious and dead-end research, are they?

The launch site usefully reminds us that, “Chemistry is concerned with the study of matter on all levels, including its composition, structure, properties and how it can be transformed in chemical reactions.” Again, they’re not wrong there. But, speaking of definitions of chemistry, I thought Walt’s definition in Breaking Bad was pretty good.

If you don’t know about Breaking Bad (It’s not on UK TV yet, for instance), the plot involves a stressed-out, 50y old, high school chemistry teacher, who’s moonlighting at a carwash to make ends meet when he discovers his wife is pregnant and he’s dying of lung cancer. In desperation he hooks up with a crystal meth pusher and starts cooking up some highly pure and enormous crystals in the back of an RV. Needless to say the local dealers don’t like him muscling in on their patch, and he attempts to murder them (in the back of the RV) by pouring powdered red phosphorus on to a pan of boiling methanol. A quick lesson in the incredible corrosive properties of hydrofluoric acid – it burns through metal, rock, ceramic, but not polythene – all adds to the fun and games.

Anyway, Breaking Bad, with its periodic table credits, is a lot more entertaining than yet another chemistry journal. Although I am sure the Nature effort will turn out not to be YAFCJ at all but instead a major success, nudging JACS, Chem Comm, and Angewandte a little further along the virtual shelving.

Meanwhile, thanks for Chemistry Lab Notebook for the tip-off.

Beer or Wine?

Beer or Wine? The choice is yours!In the good-old days there was no choice, if you were posh you drank wine, if you were not you drank beer. Same goes for the Beatles-Stones debate. The Beatles were the nice clean-living, fun loving beat combo, whereas the Rolling Stones were the scare-your-mom hairies. But, making the choice between beer vs wine, Beatles vs Stones led to a societal bifurcation, it split us down in the middle, in other words.

What are the two tribes of today? Burberry vs Barbour? Twitcher vs Birder? Bling vs Blong? Do those sociopolitical barriers between groups still exist? Here’s a short list of the key life choices you must make to help you decide on which side of the fence you sit, in whose camp you reside, and whether you’re a “Lager Lout” or a “Winebar Winker”. Check through this highly scientific list and then cast your vote in the most important blog poll ever!

Lager Louts

  • PC
  • Star Wars
  • Snapshot
  • Windows
  • Electric
  • Pr0n
  • Rock
  • Stones
  • Jogging
  • Cook
  • Ford
  • Manchester United
  • Coffeetable book
  • Pop Tart
  • Atheism
  • Walmart
  • Constable
  • Cup of char
  • Fingers
  • Big Bong
  • Plastic bag
  • Pizza
  • Camper van
  • French fries
  • Staples
  • Tourist
  • Alpha

Winebar Winkers

  • Apple
  • Doctor Who
  • RAW Image
  • Linux
  • Acoustic
  • Erotica
  • Jazz
  • Beatles
  • Yoga
  • Chef
  • Chevy
  • Manchester City
  • MySQL Manual
  • Pop Art
  • New Age
  • Harrod’s
  • Warhol
  • Lapsang Souchong
  • Knife & fork
  • Big Bang
  • Luis Vitton
  • Pasta fresca
  • Penthouse suite
  • Morrocan couscous
  • Red paperclip
  • Traveler
  • Omega

Okay, now it’s time to vote on the single most important deciding factor in our sociopoliticoeconomico experiment. Forget Star Wars v Doctor Who. Forget jogging or yoga. Forget even the pr0n-erotica debate. On which side of the fence do you sit? When it comes to Beer or Wine?

Full Spectrum Science News

Musical molecules

Musical molecules, bright fibres, polarised brain chemistry, and cholesterol regulation, all feature in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week.

Musical molecules – What do Schroedinger’s equation and Schoenberg’s expressionism have in common? Not a lot you might think. However, researchers in Germany and the US have now modelled the hydrogen molecule, the archetypal subject of molecular modelling, using a theory of behaviour that emerges from music. The study demonstrates how a hydrogen molecule responds to laser pulses as if the molecule’s vibrational motions, its quantum states, were the notes making up a changing musical chord and offers the opportunity of laser-controlled chemical reactions.

Fibre, fibre burning bright – A European research team has developed novel strategies for the rapid trace element analysis of metals in polyamide synthetic fibres by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Their method allows the accurate determination for quality control of polyamide products containing titanium dioxide as an optical brightener.

Bad cholesterol regulator – US researchers have discovered exactly how a destructive protein binds to and interferes with one of the molecules involved in removing low-density lipoproteins (LDL), the so-called “bad” cholesterol, from the blood.

Bipolar disorder – Spectroscopic studies of post mortem brain chemistry reveals that sufferers of bipolar disorder (often referred to as manic depression) have a distinct chemical signature linked to this mental illness. A collaboration between researchers in the UK and US also suggests a possible mode of action for the mood stabilisers used to treat the disorder and how they counteract changes in brain chemistry.

Technological To-Do List

Technological To-Do ListA panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Mario Molina, climate change expert Rob Socolow, and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil.

I am sure some of these sci-celebs are mavericks in their own way, but if that’s the case why do some entries on their list of 14 technological challenges for our age read like the section headings from a college student essay or worse still a beauty pageant winner’s wishlist?

  • Engineering better medicines
  • Advancing health informatics
  • Providing access to clean water
  • Providing energy from fusion
  • Making solar energy economical
  • Restoring and improving urban infrastructure
  • Enhancing virtual reality
  • Reverse engineering the brain
  • Exploring natural frontiers
  • Advancing personalized learning
  • Developing carbon sequestration methods
  • Managing the nitrogen cycle
  • Securing cyberspace
  • Preventing nuclear terror

Okay, don’t get me wrong, world peace and universal wellness are noble aims and avoiding nuclear terror should be a priority. Moreover, even beginning to approach some of these problems will take a maverick or two, and many will probably remain intractable well beyond the twenty-first century. Despite advances in functional MRI, I don’t think we’re that close to reverse engineering the brain, for instance. We are really not going to come close to “managing” the nitrogen cycle any time soon either; we cannot yet make perfectly accurate weather or climate forecasts let alone find ways to control the global flux of atmospheric gases.

Another worrying property of the list is that in some sense a few of the entries are redundant. If we have access to solar power, why would we need fusion power? Even if we get to grips with fusion, building fusion reactor power stations is going to be incredibly expensive and difficult to do at least compared to the solar option. Some people would argue that CO2 is not an issue and others would suggest that the threat of nuclear terrorism is not what the scaremongers would have us believe, so maybe those list entries are also redundant.

Socolow admits in an interview that the challenge of coming up with 14 must-do technological developments was “crazy”. “We came up with broad categories of the challenges that lie ahead and within those categories identified specific initiatives,” he says.

The panel didn’t actually rank the 14 challenges in any particular order. It was obviously a tough call to decide whether advancing health informatics is any more or less important than advancing personalized learning. However, preventing nuclear terror should come well above reverse engineering the brain and perhaps even above engineering better medicines, surely?

Likewise, enhancing virtual reality and exploring natural frontiers will allow humanity to advance way beyond the claustrophobic confines of our current mindset, but if millions of people are without clean water, then we might as well be in the dark ages.

Apparently, the panel released its report in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), so I suspect it was more than a little tongue in cheek in some respects, especially given some of the personal reports I’ve heard from fellow science journalists about the quality (or lack thereof) of this year’s meeting.

CO2 Refusenik to Win Pulitzer

Polar bear

Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings.

Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for the sake of it, but more seriously for the sake of science, I’d like your thoughts on the following article. It was published on ScienceandPublicPolicy.org, which is controversial enough, with the organisation’s Chief Science Advisor being Willie Soon, who along with Sally Baliunus, suggests that climate change is down to non-anthropogenic phenomena.

Anyway, the SPPI article highlights how some scientists have apparently now broken ranks to proclaim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not quite the forceful climate change driver those who advocate a global carbon tax would have us believe. After all, if George W Bush is suddenly on-message when it comes to the environment, then something is surely wrong with the world. Of course, I’d want the full insider details and to know if there are any conflicts of interest before taking any refusenik too seriously.

The post’s author Jerry Carlson suggests that a brave journalist who stands up against the carbon conspiracy might be in line for a Pulitzer by 2010. There are a few out there who are making waves including at least one NYT writer, he tells us. Carlson suggests that in order to take the Prize, that enterprising investigative journo will have to find answers to an intriguing pair of questions. I’m sure the folks at RealClimate.org will be readying their riposte right now, if they haven’t already, but here are Carlson’s queries for the record:

First, he asks, why don’t those who suggest we reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions and sequester carbon ever mention the enormous opportunities for feeding the world that might come from longer growing seasons and higher carbon availability for crops? Historically, civilisation has seemingly thrived when the climate has been warmer and wetter and agriculture more prolific. One might also tack on to the CO2 question the issue of water vapour being a much broader and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 as well as a dozen other apparently unaddressed issues within the climate change models.

The second Pulitzer-winning question Carlson offers is: Why is the IPCC’s projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it is well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?

My own additional question to IPCC would ask about that 10% uncertainty in their initial report that suggested we are 90% certain that humans are responsible for rising temperature trends. 9 to 1 against is long odds, but not lottery impossible and mean that there is a chance (albeit just one in ten) that our carbon emissions are not to blame. If they’re not to blame, then rather than asking what is perhaps it’s time we checked the climate change data and took a more rigorous look at the historical and prehistorical trends, before it’s too late.

We live in an ice age, by definition; there is ice at the poles and that defines it as such. But, despite measurable volume changes in the Arctic ice sheet, NASA satellite images show without doubt that the ice cap is growing. Couldn’t that cause cooling because of increased reflectance? It has been said before, but what if we actually manage to reduce CO2 levels only to discover that the earth’s natural cycle is about to take us into a deeper ice age? We’ll regret meddling with atmospherics if it does. But, at least the growing polar bear population will be happy.

Drug Design on the Playstation

Serious drug design researchers are apparently hacking their PS3 machines to turn them into drug discovery workhorses. At least that’s according to my alma mater New Scientist magazine. It’s the kind of catchy subject they cover and is a classic from Mike Nagle.

The PS3 console uses a Cell chip, made by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, which is composed of a CPU and eight slave processors that run on Linux. According to NS, this chip is prized by chemists and physicists alike because the same kind of calculations it uses to produce the stunning, high-quality PS3 graphics for gaming are just about the same those needed to simulate reactions between particles, ranging from the molecular to the astronomical (apparently, you can do black holes with it too).

But, when we say they’re hacking the PS3, it’s not like these scientists are just plugging in a data cable and running their lab. According to NS, University of Massachusetts astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has actually strung together 16 PS consoles to simulate the gravity waves that to occur when two black holes collide. While University of Illinois chemist Todd Martinez is running particle simulations on a Playstation, with 1000 atoms (a small protein in other words) that can be done 130 times faster than on an ordinary PC.

It’s all quite twee really, what with the surgeons cannibalizing their Wii consoles to do virtual operations and chemists latching on to the power of virtual world Second Life too. One can almost imagine the response of the peer review panels as the grant applications start to roll in with instrumentation inventories listing costs for 32 PS3 consoles, 20 Wii controllers, a couple of PSPs, and a dozen iPhones. The real test will come though if they can get away with tacking on a few copies of World of Warcraft and Nintendogs Labrador Retriever & Friends.

Watery Typo Leads to Salvation

Water salvation, photo by David Bradley

In the realm of physical chemistry (or is it chemical physics?) there was almost theological interest in this week’s Alchemist. Having written about water glass and how low-temperature studies of aqueous phase changes are helping scientists to explain this anomalous and yet ubiquitous material it was a simple spellcheck-induced typo that drew the most interest from The Alchemist’s email newsletter readers.

Wave after wave (pardon the pun) of correspondents got in touch almost as soon as the newsletter was dispatched to point out that I, Uberpedant Taskmaster General had been hoist by my own petard. In describing water’s fascinating properties I described its ability to interact act at a fundamental level with many other materials as being related to its “powerful salvation properties”. Like I said, my petard was well and truly hoist. Of course, some would say it was a baptism of fire to describe water thus, but that would be nothing but hot air with an earthy stench. Thus having shoehorned allusions to all four classical elements into that last sentence, I stand before you hands up and head bowed, seeking solvation!

Meanwhile, back with the chemistry news. I also report in The Alchemist on a new approach to engineering goats to produce medicinal milk which has been devised in Pennsylvania. The research could be good news for people with diabetes. Then there’s the finding that a well-known anticancer compound also used as an antiparasitic drug could turn out to be an even better multitasker operating as it does as an effective antiviral against HIV.

Also this week, a multitude of awards from the National Academy of Sciences for diverse chemical discoveries. You can read the list of winners on the Chemweb site, together with links to the juicy bits on how much money they got, in other words.

Finally, in the legendary world of organic synthesis a wartime effort to synthesize quinine may have been vindicated while Canadian chemists have constructed nanoscopic gas cylinders from barium organotrisulfonate that come with temperature-controlled valves for trapping hydrogen and carbon dioxide. And, speaking of which, I have a hopefully typo-free but far more controversial item on the whole issue of carbon footprints, climate change now live on the Sciencebase blog.

Search and Cite for Science Bloggers

Crossref for WordPress

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post by Will Griffiths on the ChemSpider Open Chemistry Web blog about how the DOI citation system of journal article lookups might be improved. The DOI system basically assigns each research paper a unique number depending, with an embedded publisher tag. Enter a DOI into a look up box (e.g. the DOI lookup on Sciencebase, foot of that page) and it almost instantaneously takes you to the paper in question. I use the DOI system for references in Sciencebase posts all the time.

There are a few cons that counteract its various pros, for instance, not all publishers use it and among those that do there are some who do not implement the DOI for their papers until they are in print, as opposed to online. Despite that it is very useful and commonly used. Having read Griffiths’ post about OpenURL a non-proprietary DOI alternative, I thought maybe it would be even more powerful if the concept were taken back another step the author level and I came up with the concept of a PaperID, which I blogged about on Chemspy.com. PaperID, I reasoned could be a unique identification tag for a reasearch paper, created by the author using a central open system (akin to the InChI code for labelling individual compounds). I’m still working out the ins and outs of this concept and while a few correspondents have spotted potentially fatal flaws others see it as a possible way forward.

Meanwhile, CrossRef, the association behind the publisher linking network, has just announced a beta version of a plugin for bloggers that can look up and insert DOI-enabled citations in a blog post. I’ve not investigated the plugin in detail yet, but you can download from a Crossref page at Sourceforge.net. the Crossref plugin apparently allows bloggers to add a widget to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed and you then either click on a hit to go to the DOI, or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into their blog entry. I presume they’re using plugin and widget in the accepted WordPress glossary sense of those words as the plugin is available only for WordPress users at the moment with a MoveableType port coming soon.

According to Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, “CrossRef is helping jumpstart the process of citing the formal literature from blogs. While there is a growing trend in scientific and academic blogging toward referring to formally published literature, until now there were few guidelines and very few tools to make that process easy.” Well that reference to a jumpstart sounds like marketing-speak to me, as Sciencebase and dozens of other science blogs have been using DOI for years.

Whether or not I will get around to installing what amounts to yet another WordPress plugin I haven’t decided. I may give it a go, but if it works as well as is promised you will hopefully not see the join. Meanwhile, let me have your thoughts on the usefulness of DOI and the potential of OpenURL and PaperID in the usual place below.