Well, that was fun! So why stop now? Here’s a bunch of suggested links and reading materials from last night’s talks, sent to us by our speakers and our friends at the San Francisco Public Library.
From “Out of Sight: Emerging Pat
hogens in a Changing World” by Dr. Shannon Bennett
– HealthMap
– Dept. of Microbiology at the Cal. Academy of Sciences
– @MicrobeExplorer <– Be nice! Shannon is new to the Twitters.
– “Epidemic Dynamics Revealed in Dengue Evolution”
– “Natural attenuation of dengue virus type-2 after a series of island outbreaks: A retrospective phylogenetic study of events in the South Pacific three decades ago”
– “Molecular evolution and phylogeny of dengue type 4 virus in the caribbean”
– “Selection-Driven Evolution of Emergent Dengue Virus”
– “Invasion and Maintenance of Dengue Virus Type 2 and Type 4 in the Americas”
– “Mosquito Vector Diversity across Habitats in Central Thailand Endemic for Dengue and Other Arthropod-Borne Diseases”
– Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease by Mark Harrison
– Emerging Epidemics: The Menace of New Infections by Madeline Drexler
– Pandemic Survival: It’s Why You’re Alive by Ann Love & Jane Drake (This one is for the kids!)
From “Broadband Deliverance: How Wireless is Changing the Face of Disaster Response” by Aaron Mason
– @aaron_mason
– Ubiquiti Networks
– Vodafone Instant Network
– OpenStreetMap
– Republic Wireless
– Inveneo
– Project Link
– Wireless Networking: Absolute Beginner’s Guide by Michael Miller
– Modern Survival: How to Cope When Everything Falls Apart by Barry Davies
– Disaster Preparedness Handbook: A Guide for Families by Arthur T. Bradley
From “The Ferry Building: Portal to the Past and Gateway to the Future” by Justin Jones
Hops & History, Round 2
History talks, craft beer tasting, panels, homebrewing demos, food, and historical brewing ephemera
July 24th 6:30-9:30pm
Unlimited Beer at The Old Mint
www.sfhistory.org/flipside
BONUS: $5 discount with nerdnite5
You can learn lots more about the Ferry Building and many other local treasures through the CityGuides tours (Justin is also a guide.)
– The Ferry Building: Witness to a Century of Change, 1898-1998 by Nancy Olmsted
– Ferry Building State Park: A Proposal for a State Park at San Francisco’s Historic Ferry Building (1955)
– The Ferry Building, San Francisco, California: Workshop Summary and Development Concepts. (1993)
A microbiologist, a wireless communications specialist, and a San Francisco history aficionado walk into a bar… THIS IS NOT A JOKE! This is what’s going to happen on the third Wednesday of July and it’s going to be awesome! So get your anti-heebie-jeebie meds ready, smartphone charged, and sense of awe geared up–we’re going to talk emerging pathogens, wireless disaster response, and Ferry Building history with music, chili, and copious amounts of alcohol to help steady the nerves. Be there and be square!
Wednesday, 7/16/2014
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets available here!
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“Out of Sight: Emerging Pathogens in a Changing World” by Dr. Shannon Bennett
Join us on a morbid journey of discovery to find out where the microbes that make us sick come from and how they got here. From the tropics to your own backyard, encounters with infectious diseases abound, challenging our immune systems and indeed our very existence. Be prepared to ponder viruses with terrifying names like break-bone fever! Be a responsible host: Leave no trace.
Shannon heads the Microbiology Department at the California Academy of Sciences, where she applies advances in genomics and bioinformatics to study dengue, hantavirus, influenza, and bacteria found in mosquito vectors. She is particularly interested in mutations that give viruses the ability to cause epidemics or switch to new hosts.
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“Broadband Deliverance: How Wireless is Changing the Face of Disaster Response” by Aaron Mason
Natural disasters scramble everything: They flatten buildings, wash away neighborhoods, and leave communities reeling. But what happens next? We’ll take a look at the aftermath of a disaster and dig into some of the new wireless technologies that are changing the face of response–from long-range WiFi to inflatable satellite dishes, to the surge in community-based response.
Aaron deploys things that help people communicate. He spent over a year in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and has deployed wireless networks around the world with Inveneo. Today he’s part of the team at OnBeep and serves an advisor to the SF Mayor’s office on communications strategy.
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“The Ferry Building: Portal to the Past and Gateway to the Future” by Justin Jones
In downtown SF, ships and other remnants of the past lie buried right below our feet. But little of the city?s early history remains visible, except for the Ferry Building, whose saga chronicles the founding–and near destruction–of our beloved city. Long before BART and bridges, it was the gatekeeper to Baghdad by the Bay, with over 250,000 passengers a day passing through its marble halls. Hear how this survivor of two major earthquakes, the premature death of its architect, and dreaded redevelopment endures as a symbol of the future and reminder of our wild past.
Justin is a Bay Area native, SF history aficionado, active CityGuide, and board member of the SF Museum and Historical Society. When not driving his girlfriend crazy with random history facts, he works at a healthcare startup.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
And: Get your spice on with Kevin & Gail’s Chili Palace, who’ll be serving delicious hot chili upstairs.
Mysterious messages in fading paint, chimerical quests in skull research, and computers providing talk therapy to human language: A veritable panoply of nerdiness will be emanating from our presenters and their laptops this month. No June Gloom here, what with cocktails, music, grilled cheese, and firing synapses to warm us up. Be there and be square!
Wednesday, 6/18/2014
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets available here!
Co-curated with our friends at the Brilliant!Science Festival at the California Academy of Sciences.
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“Google Maps, Ghost Signs, and the Incomplete City: An Archaeology of Post-Earthquake Development in San Francisco’s Tenderloin” by Kasey Smith
After the 1906 earthquake, SF’s redevelopment was swift but uneven, with redevelopment of the Tenderloin taking many years. During this period, ads were painted on buildings only to be covered by new construction. The resulting “ghost signs,” which have emerged over the years as the city changes, can often be viewed on foot or with satellite images to see onto rooftops and behind buildings. What stories of yesteryear can we learn from studying these mysterious ads and signs?
Kasey is an artist focusing on the history of Bay Area urban space. For the past three years she’s been working on a project to document, research, and map all of San Francisco’s ghost signs.
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“What the Quck? Stem Cells, Skulls, and Evolution” by Rich Schneider
In the science-fiction tradition of H.G. Wells and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Rich Schneider’s fascination with the origins of animal form runs deep. He will explain how his efforts to understand the way dog skulls get shaped ultimately led him to create a stem cell transplant system whereby duck embryos grow quail-like beaks in chimeric creatures he calls quck. Not only do quck walk like duck, quack like quail, and taste like chicken, they also teach us much about how our own faces get patterned.
Now a faculty member in UCSF’s department of orthopedic surgery, Rich published his first paper on the skulls of dogs and wolves when he was still an undergraduate. Over the past 20 years, he has focused on molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying skull development and evolution.
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“What Inarticulate Computers Tell Us About Human Eloquence” by Amit Dubey
In 2011, IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri brought the science fiction of talking computers to the real world–but no one has thrown away their keyboards or touch screens yet! And today Shit Siri Says lambasts egregious failures as much as it hails the wit of “her” engineers. It might be surprising, then, that computers are helping psychologists better understand how we use language. This talk’ll explain how, uncovering a dirty little secret kept by psycholinguists, the awkward sentences that make their hearts flutter, and the computer programs that bring both together.
This talk describes (in part) work done by Amit while a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. He currently works at Google.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
And: Come hungry for the Grilled Cheese Guy, who’ll be upstairs slinging sammies!
Thanks to our speakers Lydia Laurenson, Pleuni Pennings, and Daniel Cohen for three excellent talks. If you want to learn more, you’re in luck! Here are all the links and citations mentioned in their talks, and a list of materials that riff on the presenters’ themes provided by our friends at the San Francisco Public Library. Enjoy!
“Censorship, Colors, Collectivism, & Salesmanship: How Culture Affects Social Media” by Lydia Laurenson
- Twitter: @lydialaurenson, Blog: journalismforbrands.com
- Lydia’s O’Reilly Strata article “Measuring culture” with much more info about the topics in her talk
- And TechCrunch article “The Censorship Effect“
- Products mentioned: LINE, Kik, Bubbly, WeChat,
- Wan-Hsiu (Sunny) Tsai, Linjuan Rita Men, (2012) “Cultural values reflected in corporate pages on popular social network sites in China and the United States”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 6 Iss: 1, pp.42 – 58 (Abstract)
- Hochman, Nadav, and Raz Schwartz. “Visualizing Instagram: Tracing cultural visual rhythms.” Proceedings of the Workshop on Social Media Visualization (SocMedVis) in conjunction with the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM–12). 2012. (Full text)
- Usunier, Jean-Claude, and Nicolas Roulin. “The influence of high-and low-context communication styles on the design, content, and language of business-to-business web sites.” Journal of Business Communication 47.2 (2010): 189-227. (Abstract)
From the SFPL:
“Learning from Stupid Ideas & HIV Treatment Gone Wrong” by Pleuni Pennings
- Twitter: @pleunipennings, Blog: http://pleunipennings.wordpress.com/
- HIV Statistics: San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and the CDC
- Reiss, Peter, et al. “Resumption of HIV antigen production during continuous zidovudine treatment.” The Lancet 331.8582 (1988): 421. (Subscription/Paywall)
- Pennings, Pleuni Simone. “Standing genetic variation and the evolution of drug resistance in HIV.” PLoS computational biology 8.6 (2012): e1002527. (Full text)
- Margot, N. A., et al. “Resistance development over 144 weeks in treatment‐naive patients receiving tenofovir disoproxil fumarate or stavudine with lamivudine and efavirenz in Study 903*.” HIV medicine 7.7 (2006): 442-450. (Full text)
From the SFPL:
“Walk This Way: The Strange Story of Bioelectricity” by Daniel J. Cohen
- McCaig, Colin D., Bing Song, and Ann M. Rajnicek. “Electrical dimensions in cell science.” Journal of cell science 122.23 (2009): 4267-4276. (Full text)
- Zhao, Min. “Electrical fields in wound healing—an overriding signal that directs cell migration.” Seminars in cell & developmental biology. Vol. 20. No. 6. Academic Press, 2009. (Subscription/Paywall)
- The discoveries : great breakthroughs in 20th century science : including the original papers / Alan Lightman. –History of 20th c. science (vitalism vs. mechanism)
- A short history of nearly everything / Bill Bryson. (ebook!) –History of Science
- De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari by Luigi Galvani
- Cohen, Daniel J., W. James Nelson, and Michel M. Maharbiz. “Galvanotactic control of collective cell migration in epithelial monolayers.” Nature materials (2014). (Abstract, but if you contact Daniel a copy can be made upon request)
- Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience, Piccolino and Bresadola (Google Books preview)
From the SFPL:
See you on June 18th for NNSF #49. Until then, happy nerding!
Wednesday, 5/21/2014
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets available here
Shall we put some stupid, bizarre, and even foreign ideas into your heads? Yes, yes, and yes! Make the merriest month the smartest one with an evolutionary biologist turning dumb ideas into smart research, an engineer teaching us the steps to the bioelectric slide, and a communications pro delving into how cultural differences disrupt the social media-scape. Be there and be square!
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“Censorship, Colors, Collectivism, & Salesmanship: How Culture Affects Social Media” by Lydia Laurenson
Did you know people use Instagram to sell sacrificial goats in Kuwait? That censorship is a business risk for Weibo (aka “Chinese Twitter”)? Or that untrained Australians and Israelis may have more instincts for building Google-optimized sites than Russians and Egyptians? Find out what recent research reveals about the subtle–and not-so-subtle–ways that cultural differences affect social media communication.
Lydia is a writer, researcher, and communications professional fascinated by social media and community dynamics. She has spoken at venues ranging from SXSW to U.C. Berkeley, and her writing has appeared in publications from The Guardian to SFWeekly. Lydia also served in the U.S. Peace Corps HIV program in Swaziland.
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“Learning from Stupid Ideas & HIV Treatment Gone Wrong” by Pleuni Pennings
The 30-year history of HIV treatment is one of medical triumph: HIV was a death sentence and is now a manageable and preventable disease. But the road to triumph is littered with some pretty stupid ideas. “Drug holidays,” for example, were once fashionable, but now are considered the worst thing a patient can do. Intrigued by these stupid ideas, this evolutionary biologist decided to use them for research on drug resistance in HIV. She’ll also talk about inadequate treatment for pregnant women and a prevention pill that works but isn’t used.
Pleuni is an evolutionary biologist and works at Stanford. She prefers programming to fieldwork and viruses to dinosaurs.
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“Walk This Way: The Strange Story of Bioelectricity” by Daniel J. Cohen
Oh, the things we’ll discuss! The philosophical implications of sex in garbage? Of course. The unholy bond linking pasta with Frankenstein? Most definitely. Machines made of frogs? Why not? Shirtless scientists, Benedict Cumberbatch, and sheepherding will also make appearances. Shocks (literally) and awe (hopefully) will abound as we explore both the origins of one of the most bizarre areas of science and why bioelectricity matters today.
Daniel recently escaped graduate school with most of his fingers intact and a PhD in Frankenstein-related science. He is now a post-doc at Stanford where he is applying his questionable skills to building cell-scale sheepdogs.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
And: Oakland’s finest fiveten burger, purveyor of artisan burgers and sandwiches made with fresh, locally sourced ingredients! (www.fivetenburger.com)
Wednesday, 4/16/2014
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets SOLD OUT, but a few may be available at the door…
Worrying about The Big One? Wondering about native bivalves? Wary of the battle between mind & body? Well, quake no more, ’cause we have three disaster experts ready for any catastrophe, an aw-shucks oyster authority dropping some pearls of wisdom, and a physician assistant first doing no harm and then playing with our heads a little. Tip your barkeep, grab a tamale, don’t hang the DJ. Oh, and be there and be square!
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“Emergency Management, or WWTLJD? (What Would Tommy Lee Jones Do?)” by Alicia Johnson, Sean O’Mara, and Tom Chin
Shit happens. But what might happen when said shit–say, an earthquake like the tsunami-spawning, magnitude 9-er of 2011–happens to a city like ours? Unlike in the 1997 Tommy Lee Jones classic Volcano (the quintessential emergency management film), it won’t include a K-Rail and red-hot lava. Come hang out with three of SF’s Emergency Management staff to get a taste of our city’s incident command and disaster preparedness, and learn how YOU’d respond under the pressure of a cataclysm. We promise you won’t need a helmet…for now!
Alicia, Sean, and Tom have seen their share of emergency ops centers. As staffers at SF Emergency Management, they and their colleagues prepare and protect the people and places we love.
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“More Than Just a $1 Happy-Hour Special: The Olympia Oyster in SF Bay” by Christopher Lim
The Olympia oyster is a Bay Area native and yet it is not as well known as its larger, faster-growing cousin, the typical $1-happy-hour oyster. But oh man, does it taste better! The Watershed Project is working to restore Olympia oysters to SF Bay–but please, don’t eat our science experiment! Not every creature in the water should be first thought of as “food.” That’s old-school. We’re doing it because oysters are part of a healthy ecosystem. And that’s good for me, you, water, fish, and birds–oh my! Find out why.
Christopher is the Living Shoreline program manager at The Watershed Project. He’s always impressed by the inherent connection people have to an animal that most closely resembles a rock and lacks fur, feathers, or flukes.
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“The Doctor Will Fool You Now: Placebos and Nocebos” by Lisa Spitalewitz
Most people think of a placebo as a sugar pill used in studies as the inactive alternative to a drug, but the placebo effect–when the dummy pill actually works–is also a part of routine health care. And in an age of informed consent, the unwelcome nocebo effect shows up every time you read that long list of side effects and you suddenly start itching. Hear about some surprising studies on these powerful effects and the ways they can change our lives–and probably already have.
Lisa is a physician assistant practicing in urgent care and occupational medicine. She won’t write that antibiotics Rx for your cold symptoms, even if that makes you like her a little less.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
And: Get yer fill of tamales from Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas!