Hispanic-y Shenanigans from NIGMS

I was going to just add this as a late addendum to the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival #3 in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. Since this involves the NIH IC that focuses so much energy on enhancing diversity in science, I thought it deserved a little more.
A recent post on the NIGMS blog Feedback Loop tells us that:

The end of this year’s observation coincided with the opening ceremony of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Conference, which is supported by NIGMS.
The SACNAS conference highlights the scientific contributions of Hispanics and Native Americans and fosters the development of new scientists.

The entry goes on to detail the honoring of three of their NIGMS grantees. Go Read.

HP Challenges the DM readers to throw down for DonorsChoose!

Breaking news from the DonorsChoose Social Media Challenge for 2009! HP already contributed $50 to every challenge on the board. Now they are offering a matching deal to spur competition. PalMD’s and Isis’ readers may have exhausted their wallets and now it is time to catch up by scoring matching funds from HP. From the DonorsChoose email:

HP has been tracking the competition closely and has already made a $50 contribution to your page, as a result of all of your hard work. The good news? HP wants to make yet another contribution to your Giving Page. The more you raise by this Sunday, October 25, the more HP will contribute!
Next week, we will distribute $200,000, the rest of HP’s contribution, to all Social Media Challenge Giving Pages. But this time, your share will be calculated on a pro-rata basis based on the amount you’ve raised by Sunday. What does that mean? Now is the time to motivate your readers, followers, friends, fam and fans to donate to your page, so you can claim a larger share of the funds!
And there’s yet another bonus: after the Challenge is over, everyone who donated to your Giving Page will get a DonorsChoose.org Giving Card, courtesy of HP. Those donors will get to decide which projects are supported with HP’s $200,000 in funds

So if you’ve been holding back or meaning to get to it, now’s the time to stroll on over to the DM Challenge page and give a few bucks to the kids.

Repost: More on Neurotree

sourceI‘m attending the SfN meeting and was reminded of this post because of renewed interactions with my academic family tree members. Also by the usual observation that trainees are often ignorant of the connections within their own trees and how this can help their career goals, i.e., in landing postdoc slots. Since I last talked about Neurotree, the big change seems to be the launch of several new topic-related academic trees. Also, the growth stats seem to imply Neurotree has reached a peak in the growth of inclusion of scientists and there was no fall quarter (SfN annual meeting?) bump in growth of the tree last year. This post originally appeared on Nov 30, 2007.

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I had a note before on the Neurotree.org site which is databasing neuroscientists’ training genealogies. The masters of Neurotree have put up a growth chart which shows that additions continue to accelerate each quarter. Some of the discussion under my prior post seemed to find this a mere interesting curiosity. I have been thinking about this as I’ve browsed around on the site and come to a different conclusion.