cpikas | February 3, 2010I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010.
I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.
Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press
Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining. Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had 13k sales, but…
cpikas | January 31, 2010There's a lot of discussion about women in STEM and business and the barriers they face (justifiably so!), but what about men in the "female professions"? Do they face the same glass ceiling?
It turns out that there's a classic paper on this that coined the term, "glass escalator." It is somewhat classic, so I briefly looked for more recent work that cited it to see if it had been debunked, but didn't find any studies that did not confirm the results*
Here's the citation:
Williams, C.L. (1992). The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions. Social Problems, 39,…
cpikas | January 28, 2010I've only been a college student and grad student at one institution and I have to confess, the library treats students as second class citizens. Particularly technical services. When I mentioned in a sociology class that I am a librarian, a whole bunch of grad students piled on with complaints about interlibrary loan. One guy got only the second page of an article the first time he requested an article, then a completely illegible copy the second time, and then finally a whole copy the third time - after numerous e-mails and about 6 weeks. He kept asking because he didn't want to let them…
cpikas | January 26, 2010Dorothea Salo reports that the scientists she spoke with at Science Online 2010 did not get why she was there or even why librarians would be interested in science communication. For some reason, I didn't get that so much, if at all, this year at this venue. Not that I haven't gotten that in the past. What happens now is a bit more interesting. Someone who doesn't know me either personally or through my blog will start down that direction, and someone else will say something along the lines: Oh, that's Christina, she's ok. This happens at work quite a bit, too. Huh.
This isn't exactly what I…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist
SK â definition of civility at your site â if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about.
F-r - politeness or is it being a decent human â in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language â so itâs not just being polite. Itâs more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome.*
Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome â…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Led by Maria Droujkova and Blake Stacey.
We started with a pretty basic discussion of how to show math on the web. I use the math sandbox on mediawiki and use a png. B recommends replacemath.js http://mathcache.appspot.com/static/docs.html â it also provides an alt tag that has the LaTeX in it. Sitmo â LaTeX equation editor is one M has had some success with.
Example â Radiometer â the very simple thing- requires very complex analysis using kinetic theory of gases⦠so visualization from Greg Egan.
B took a bunch of computers they bought for some unsuccessful physics education initiative and…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Jacqueline Floyd and Chris Rowan
JF studied spreading centers off of Galapagos. When she did her PhD hard to get data â but she did ask for and get some, wrote a paper that ended up on the front page of Science. Now, data is widely available, but thereâs almost too much, so more effort is needed to organize and work with the data. Big science efforts such as the new OOI (see my workshop info) and Ridge2000 (3-d imaging terabytes, few scientists studying).
Newish stuff: iphone seismometer, USGS twitter project to see where shaking is reported to try to find the center and the impact on the…
cpikas | January 16, 2010Anil Dash (first employee at SixApart (movabletype), long time blogger).
Milestone â thereâs a blog on the White House website. Made statement that federal govât interest and use of new media â most interesting startup 2009. So then he set out to make it true.
Govât picks experts, brings them in, listens to them for a bit in a closed door session, and then they go home. How can this be done more transparently using online tools. Expert Labs â part of AAAS.
ends up being really
Govât bureaucracy has huge impact on science and technology innovation and use. Needs to be some translation.…
cpikas | January 16, 2010This is a session by Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo .
They started with a bunch of questions. About half the room was librarians, of the others split between affiliated with an institution and not. Where do you go for full text? Google, Google Scholar. Does that work? Sometimes - if not quick if not free to me then move on.
See if your state library has research databases - like NClive, iConn. Contact one of us and we'll put you in contact with someone local.
Come ask your librarian if you need help with anything - even if they don't already provide that service, you help them with…
cpikas | January 16, 2010John Hogenesch, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology - Penn School of Med
gene-at-a-time is giving way to genome wide - larger datasets, collaborative research
last year more added to genebank than all previous years combined (wow!) - exceeds Moore's law.
Academia responds by buying storage and clusters - but you need great IT staff - and it's really hard to get and keep them (they go to industry), heating & cooling, depreciation, usage/provisioning (under/over utilized). Larger inter-institutional grids - access is tightly regulated, they are very complex to program in/for
Cloud computing…
cpikas | January 16, 2010part deux (actually this is the regular conference session)
This is the session on Saturday morning at 9. Moderated by Deepak Singh (coast to coast bio) and Kiki Sanford.
What is podcasting? audio or video plus subscription plus portability.
Some of the podcasters have gone away from calling things podcasts â they call them âshowsâ.
Deepakâs experience is different â theyâre only looking to talk about what theyâre interested in, which maybe 50 people are interested in. Heâs found that the conversation is better â have 1000 people listening a week. Theyâre not worried about doing it…
cpikas | January 15, 2010PalMD taught this workshop Friday, January 15. These are my quick notes.
use an external mic â doesnât have to be that expensive, if you have multiple people in the room, you might want a 2 channel mic
use audacity and plan to do a lot of editing
find a place to host these things, he found that even with 30-40 downloads of a 30 minute podcast, his bandwidth charges would be really high, so he is hosting his on ScienceBlogs.com (I wonder if OurMedia.org is an option?)
Need to save and then export to MP3
create an RSS file so people can find new entries â he manually edits one each time and…
cpikas | January 9, 2010In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given. The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it.
So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts:
MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for…
cpikas | January 8, 2010We're just about set for a fabulous session on citation/bibliographic/reference managers at the upcoming Science Online conference. The session wiki page is here, so you can hop over there an add questions or suggestions if you'd like.
John Dupuis and I are moderating and we'll have the following folks there talk about some of the most popular options:
Kevin Emamy (CiteULike)
Jason Hoyt (Mendeley)
Trevor Owens (Zotero)
Michael Habib (2Collab)
John has a lot of experience with EndNote and we both have a lot of experience with RefWorks.
The main point, though, is to have a great conversation…
cpikas | December 31, 2009In the past few years a number of large electronic resources have gone through rather dramatic interface changes - mostly for the better, mostly desperately needed. Some typical things added are faceted presentation of search results, more personalization options, better ways to save and share items, cleaner design, green. I don't know why but everyone is changing their logo and site theme to some combination of green (kelly or lime), orange, and blue.(ok, I can't wait for this phase to be over!). We could talk about the various qualities of each of these design choices, but instead, I want…
cpikas | December 23, 2009The other day when I had to be at a stupid training session off site very early in the morning, I stepped on my iphone in the dark. It apparently slid out of my purse.
Sigh. It turned on, but the glass was shattered on the front. So I looked around and you could get the screen and the digitizer with a couple of tools for about $25. I carefully watched a bunch of YouTube videos and decided to give it a try. After all, pieces of glass were falling out and it didn't seem like a good idea to get many of these in my ear.
I sat down last Saturday morning to fix it. The videos I watched showed…
cpikas | December 17, 2009One thing that kind of bugs me is that people answer the question "what impact has your funding had" with things like "I hired 3 postdocs and 2 support staff." Dr Lane talked about this at the workshop, but to some extent, I don't think her solution actually got at the bigger problem: societal impact. How has your research - done with our money - made the world a better place (maybe it hasn't, but that's ok, too). In the last post I mentioned a way I think we could start to learn more about how much scientific articles were taken up in the general media. This is at least opportunity for…
cpikas | December 17, 2009One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday.
I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…
cpikas | December 17, 2009stream of consciousness notes from this meeting I attended in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Final panel
Oren Beit-Arie (Ex Libris Group), Todd Carpenter (NISO),Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC),Tony Hey (Microsoft Research),Clifford Lynch (CNI),Don Waters (Andrew W. Mellon foundation)
introduction from Cliff Lynch - gets requests for tenure reviews - he takes these very seriously. Got one that had a whole bibliometric survey of the work - with all of the citing papers, etc., about 40 pages. Things that were intended to provide insight are now used for evaluation.
Could we get access streams/patterns…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing stream of consciousness notes from this workshop held in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) - intertwined research funding structures at national and European level.
At the national level two main funding modes - institutional (block research funding of higher ed institutions), and competitive.
Orgs structured at European level - like CERN or EMBL. Joint research funding ESF or bi or multilateral. Research Frameworks. ERC
ERC Scientific Council - 22 eminent scientists. Executive Agency (where he works). 2 programs: starting grants…