In which I belatedly pick up on something in the Scienceblogs.com saga

Ran across a link to this press release dated 7/24/2010.

About Innovium Media Properties Corp.

Innovium’s venture investment portfolio is devoted to Seed Media Group LLC, a private media and technology company focused on the professional and consumer science markets. Seed’s award winning brands include Seed® (www.seedmagazine.com) and ScienceBlogs® (www.scienceblogs.com). Innovium trades under the symbol IN on the TSX Venture Exchange (“TSX-V”) and IH7 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (“FWB”).

Huh that’s funny. It has been going on since, well, at least since June 2008.

Oh, there’s a website for http://www.innovium.ca/.

Press releases..press releases. Hmm, here is one from 2005:

September 08, 2005
INNOVIUM CAPITAL CORP. REPORTS
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER DR. JAMES WATSON JOINS SEED MEDIA GROUP
Toronto … Innovium Capital Corp. reports that one of its investments, Seed Media Group, announced
yesterday the appointment of Dr. James Watson as Special Advisor to the Board. Dr. Watson received
the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA.
James Watson holds honorary degrees from 33 universities including Harvard..

So pretty much from the beginning then. Egg on my face. Guess I should have known a little something about the place I was blogging for, eh? My bad.

Okay, this puts me right out of my depth but I think this is the chart for the stock valuation of the Innovium Media Properties Corp

Ask and ye shall receive…more NIGMS grant data

NIGMS Director Jeremy Berg posted a tantalizing graph on the relationship between the eventual voted Overall Impact score for R01s assigned to his Institute and the Significance criterion on the Feedback Loop blog. This drew some interest from YHN and writedit as well as the commentariat. Nothing like a bunch of comments to stimulate the blogger to give up some more, eh?

Plot of innovation and overall impact scores in a sample of 360 NIGMS R01 applications reviewed during the October 2009 Council round. [source]

Director Berg has a new post up in which he posts additional correlation graphs. He ends with this comment.

The availability of individual criterion scores provides useful data for analyzing study section behavior. In addition, these criterion scores are important parameters that can assist program staff in making funding recommendations.

So let us connect the dots just a little bit. Remember this older post in which Director Berg came by to link us to the NIGMS data on grant awards by percentile rank? And on question indicated that as far as he knows his Institute is the only one to publish grant review data?
So I think Director Berg is probably pursuing a bit of an agenda to try to speak to other ICs of the NIH about the value of evaluating (and publishing) grant review outcomes.
Here’s where you come in. Nothing like traffic and comments on the NIGMS Feedback Loop blog entries that are of interest to this readership to help support Director Berg’s case. We scientists actually care about what they are doing and we pay attention. We seek to talk to others about their grant outcomes to refine our understanding of the process. And the most junior of us are the most needing of info…and yet the most to sea because they don’t have as many connections.
I submit that it will actually make the POs jobs easier if we have data instead of half-baked rumors and above-the-waterline partial view. Go comment!

ScienceBlogs.com Bloggers go on strike

PZ Myers is on strike. And when the Big Dog strikes, eeeeaaaverybody strikes. Even Greg Laden.

Actually, PZ lays out the case that this is about the complaints that affect all of the Scienceblogs.com bloggers pretty well:

The key problem is one of communication. The bloggers here are almost entirely in the dark about what’s going on behind the scenes, and we get news indirectly and by rumor. We’ve had almost no technical support for over a year; when we do hear what changes are being made, it’s almost always trivial tweaks to support advertising. We report bugs, we get back silence. We see the ads that appear on site getting cheesier and cheesier. We don’t know what’s happening, and there is no mechanism and no effort made to enlighten us.

That’ll do for starters.

What I’m wondering is who is going to break the picket line? Will they bring in scabs???