ScienceOnline 2010

Okay, I'll grant that visiting Second Life can seem a bit uncomfortable, especially at first, but it does open some new doors and present an alternative to travel. In flu season, virtual visits could be the next best thing to being there. (Yikes, that sounds like an ad. No more yahoo news for me!) Here's where you can attend ScienceOnline 2010 in Second Life (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Research%20Triangle%20Park/128/129/25). The next excuse might be that you don't know how to use Second Life or what to do. Never fear. That's a solvable problem. I have a primer on attending a…
A common theme I hear in talks on personalized medicine, is that increased access to genomic data and medical literature are changing the relationship between doctors and patients. Patients are through being passive recipients of paternalistic health care. They are demanding to participate and be treated as partners with health care providers. Citizen science can serve a similar role. Just as personalized medicine is starting to make it possible for individuals to monitor and participate in their own personal health, citizen science is making it possible for people to participate and…
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, or unconference, where on Saturday I will sit down with Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and anyone else who squeezes into the room, to talk about rebooting science journalism. The obvious assumption behind the topic (if I can return to the titular metaphor) is that science journalism is such a mess that it needs not just cleaning up, but a wholesale restart. But "rebooting" is probably too mild a term for what most people think is needed; if we're to stick with digital metaphors, I'd to say the assumption is more that…
At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest. One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…