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Adapting to the new ecosystem of science journalism

Next week, I'll be chairing a session at the Science Online 2010 conference called Rebooting science journalism in the age of the web. I'll be shooting the breeze with Carl Zimmer, John Timmer and David Dobbs about the transition of journalism from sheets of plant pulp to wires and wi-fi. The title of the talk had been set before the panel was assembled but, being biologists at heart, we're going to shift the metaphor from a technological one to an evolutionary one. As a species, science journalists (in all their varied forms and behaviours) have found themselves thrust into a new digital…

Morning Dip: Facebook (not) friends, paid learning, lip-reading babies, more on EHRs

"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends. People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an association -- people with good reading skills more quickly come up with or absorb textual shortcuts. Does "pay for performance" work in learning? For a bit, then not. "A number of the kids who received tokens didn't even return to reading at all," Dr. Marinak said. From the Times. Babies can…

Eagle Eyes

tags: birding, online games, eagle eyes, Audubon Society Eagle Eyes is a fun online game that focuses on teaching you to see minor differences between two seemingly identical images, such as those shown above. I earned my "Eagle Eyes" ranking (25/25) and am going to try more demanding versions of the game now. How did you do?

Counting your attitudes

Spend a few minutes at the link below to fill in an online survey about your attitude to climate change and a variety of other issues. http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNG_ee191483 Your answers are desired as the reader of a "pro-science" blog, they are confidential and will be used for a research project.

PLoS - on Twitter and FriendFeed

Despite online debates - which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek - the fact is that these are two different animals altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube - those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently. Twitter is a communications tool (or a 'human application'). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most…

HOUSE DEMS PROMOTE FIRST 100 HOURS ON SECOND LIFE: New 3D Virtual Community May Revolutionize Strategic Communication As It Moves From Independence to 'Massification'

Haven't heard of Second Life? It's a 3-D virtual world built by users or "residents" worldwide. Imagine the video game World of Warcraft, but no game, just a cyber-community evolving in ways both similar and different from the real world. The best way for me to describe Second Life is if you watch the news clip from Australian Broadcasting News above. Just press play. The creations of this world, including island mansions, stores, fantasy theme parks, virtual lectures, films, and cocktail parties, are designed by the registered users or "residents." Users navigate these creations by way…

Reacting to PRISM and publishers' concerns about 'scientific integrity' (the short version).

Even though I've been frightfully busy this week, I've been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora's comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere's reaction. If you're in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM's plans to "save" scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea. While the PRISM website claims that a consequence of more Open Access…

The Warlord in the Library: Interview with John Dupuis

John Dupuis has been writing Confessions of a Science Librarian since the time blogging software was really physically soft, being made of clay and shaped like a tablet. We finally got to meet face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference last month - a meeting long overdue until then. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. This is going to be an interesting reversal - it is usually you who gets to ask the questions in blog interviews. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? Yes, it is a bit of a reversal. But I'm not crazy…

Reading Diary: The Best Science Writing Online 2012 edited by Jennifer Ouellette and Bora Zivkovic

The Best Science Writing Online 2012 edited by Jennifer Ouellette and Bora Zivkovic is decended from the old Open Laboratory series of anthologies which featured the fifty best science blog posts (and a poem and a cartoon) from the year in question. The series as a whole was organized by Bora Zivkovic and each year he would chose someone to actually edit that particular year's edition. As well, each year they would select a bunch of science-bloggy types to help out with the pre-reading of the literally hundreds of blog posts that would be submitted, including my turn as a pre-reader for the…

Monday Links

Merry Monday. Some links for you. Science: Scientists call for changes to personal genomics based on comparison of test results Geographic Variation in Public Health Spending: Correlates and Consequences Pandemic Tests a Patchwork Health System Why the epidemiology of swine flu matters Playing catch up on flu rumors Other: The Conservative Rewrite of the Bible What Not Being Able To Buy Oil In Dollars Means David Obey's Radical Idea Q&A: Our Threatiest Threat IOZ Interviews: Malcolm Gladwell Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived

Sunday Links

No more football! (unless you consider the Pro Bowl to be football). But I got links! Science first: Scienists and Engineers for America: Senate-passed stimulus package by the numbers Cuttlefish tailor their defences to different predators Game on: sequencing companies draw battle-lines for 2009 at AGBT Whooping cough on the rise Other: You can't make this stuff up Are We Going to Buy the Bezzle? Hardball Time: Ditch the Stimulus Bipartisan bromides Dear Mr. President Fundamentally flawed stimulus coverage

$500,000 per minute

That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes. The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for 6,500 families. And let's not forget the cost of war for Iraq itself: up to 1.2 million civilians killed, and the destruction of the country's priceless heritage.

Sb's millionth comment party in Illinois

Alice Pawley of Sciencewomen fame is heading down to Champaign on September 27th to help me throw a millionth comment bash. We'll even buy you a round of booze and perhaps some yummy foods thanks to some wonderful financing by ScienceBlogs! We have tentatively planned on meeting at the Blind Pig or Jupiters Pizza (it's a bar too - don't worry!) We look forward to meeting all you ScienceBlogs fans here in Champaign-Urbana. Home of.... uhh... the University of Illinois and uhh... corn?

Exciting new online science journal

Have you ever read a paper in your field and wondered "how'd they done it?!" You read the "Materials and Methods" closely, again and again, and still have no idea how exactly was the procedure done. You want to replicate the experiment, or use the same technique for your own questions, but have no clue how to go about it. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I guess that a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, learn the experimental techniques by watching videos of people actually doing them. You can do that on the brand new journal, just starting November 30th: Journal…

Python Programming To Automate Common Tasks

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by super Python expert Al Sweigart is a pretty thick intermedia to somewhat advanced level programming book. It covers how Python works, so someone familiar with programming languages can get up to speed. Then, the book tackles a number of key important tasks one may use a computer for. This includes working with Regular Expressions, file reading and writing, web scraping, interacting with Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, scheduling things, working with email, manipulating images, and messing around with the…

Links for 2012-02-01

slacktivist » Fine-tuning the keywords on your résumé They don't warn you about the bewildering, befuddling vertigo that comes with having done everything they say to do, all to no avail, and having no idea what to do next. There you are, willing and eager to wear away whatever leather there still is on your shoes, but you have no idea what direction to walk. There sits the phone, but you have no one left to call. And you've refined your online job-searching skills to the point where it takes you only a fraction of the time to confirm that there's nothing out there. Now what? What happens…

Petition for Senators to Back Stem Cells

I had wanted to avoid being an activist with this blog, but I think it is important enough when it relates to a directly scientific issue to break that rule. The Society for Neuroscience has issued a petition request via email asking its members to petition their Senators to vote YES for the current Senate resolution reauthorizing stem cell research. Here is the email: Support Stem Cell Research Legislation! On Monday and Tuesday of next week, the Senate will consider bipartisan legislation, called The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (H.R. 810). This bill would expand federally funded…

Ten quirky species...

<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here> Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…

Evolution Gets Pixelated and Playable with Spore

Is anyone else biting at the bit to play this game? I have been following the progress of Sims guru Will Wright in his latest creation, Spore, which attempts to make a game out of evolution. Life and eventually culture is playable in a succession of phases, which are linked on the timeline of guided development: molecular, cellular, creature, tribal, civilization, terraform and galactic. Wright has incorporated much of his previous projects into Spore, heavy on the SimCity once you hit the tribal phase. More below the fold, including a longer video tutorial. Development seems to rely on the…

My first sculptie

Second Life (SL) is a 3d virtual world (some would call it an online game, but it's not really that; for one thing, it kind of sucks as a game, and for another thing, it's much more than that). You can do modeling and building entirely online. People have created buildings, vehicles, sculptures, animals, hairdos, and any number of other things using SL's relatively easy to learn modeling tools. Builds in SL are made out of "prims," short for primitives. There are a relatively small number of primitives; a block (cube), a sphere, a cylindar, a torus, a ring, that sort of thing. You can…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XXXVI: Whassup 1999 and 2008

Superbowl commercials are a thing unto themselves. Some people watch just for the commercials. The famous Apple "1984" ad only ran once, during the 1984 Superbowl, although it has been seen online hundreds of thousands of times since. Another famous ad was the 1999 Budweiser "Whassup" ad. If you've never seen it, here it is: John McCain's wealth is from his wife's family's Budweiser Distributership. Which brings us to the election-appropriate hilarious sequel, Whassup 2008:

Useful Things

Because I must trim browser tabs, here is a current short list of things that might be useful: Threebody - online implementation of the open source IAS15 integrator - a 15th order high precision N-body integrator - ASCL - Astrophysics Source Code Library - Open Source Code Visible Spectra of the Elements - Except Astatine :-( Astronomy Simulators - small web simulators for elementary concepts. Some quite nifty. From University of Nebraska. All the Kepler 2 Campaign 0 data - with some tools to play with it

My Death as Envisioned by Edward Gorey

Thanks to my blog sibling, Orac, I now know how I will die; What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die? You will be sucked dry by a leech. I'd stay away from swimming holes, and stick to good old cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when your toe scrapes the bottom.Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code And I thought I was going to be run over by a speeding bus. ... . tags: online quiz, Edward Gorey

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Moneduloides. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, two weeks from now 11 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

Out of Power

I am posting this from a friend's office because we are without power at the moment, so I can't do anything online. We got hit with a nasty snowstorm overnight, very wet and heavy snow, and have been out of power since the middle of the night. Which, in the country, means no water as well as no lights and heat. So, I'll be back to post, answer comments, chat and answer e-mail as soon as I have power again. Hopefully soon.

Eat My Dust, Darwin!

How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop: Woo! Take that, biology! Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.

If this is Friday, I must be in Sydney

I am briefly back from internetless visits to family in Victoria (my home state), and shortly to fly out to Lisbon where I am to give two talks I have yet to finish writing (of course! Not to worry, I always do this). In the interim I must proof my book and do a thousand things. Once all this is done I promise to put some substance online here. Very possibly my talk on trees (yes, there's a slew more to come). Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.

Do-it-Yourself Fireworks

Finally, our fourth and final Independence day treat--Make your own fireworks! This fun little flash tool from Fireworks.com lets you create your own fireworks display, with your choice of backdrop. There are a number of city skylines available, including Denver, New York, and San Francisco, as well as some fun sights like the Egyptian pyramids. So, if you live in an area where fireworks aren’t allowed, or just want to blow things up online, then click away!

Technical problems resolved

Previous technical problems that prevented my posts and your comments from showing up on this blog have now been resolved. Orac is back online. Everything appears to be working as it should, and you should be able to comment again. If you haven't contributed your own You might be an altie if... idea, now's the time to jump in. (There are a lot of great entries there that I wish I had thought of.) Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.

Spiders Like Meat

Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online): Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

Zimmer & Carroll vow no more bloggingheads.tv appearances

Carl Zimmer is rather mild-mannered, but has expressed rather strong sentiments about what recently happened on bloggingheads.tv. Sean Carroll, not surprisingly, has stronger opinions. But they're now both proactively dissociating themselves from bloggingheads.tv. The McWhorter & Behe discussion is now back online. The issue is really simple. John McWhorter played up Michael Behe's ideas as awesome, mind-blowing and revolutionary for an hour. Most scientists don't consider Behe's ideas controversial, they consider them crankery.

Why good science journalists are rare?

Science coverage in New York Times is good because they can afford a whole stable of people, each expert in one field only. If Carl Zimmer was forced to cover, on a daily basis and without time to research, everything from astronomy and physics to archaeology and materials science, he would do a bad job, too. But he is given time to pick his own area - evolution - to study it for years, and to write whatever the heck he wants on any given week. So Carl is an expert on what he is writing. A small paper with one science beat reporter will have to cover everything and that reporter will thus…

Snake Oil Science sounds like a great read

A former research director for a complementary and alternative medicine program at a major academic medical center has just released a book that I must get my hands on. I just learned about "Snake Oil Science" by R. Barker Bausell from a Jerry Adler article in the current issue of Newsweek (10 Dec 2007). To set the proper context, med bloggers like Orac, Dr. R.W., Panda Bear, MD, Sid Schwab, and we here at Terra Sig have been increasingly expressing concern about the seemingly uncritical integration of alternative medicine programs into some of North America's most respected medical schools…

I'm back

The long school holidays draw to a close, and with it the disruptions to my online-ness. We went to Mallorca, we went to Wales, we went to Torpenhow (the latter set is rather boring because the interesting ones are private. Sorry). So I have to catch up on a whole pile of online stuff, and rant about our stupid politicians. And cut the grass. Tomorrow.

I'm on the Internets!

By that, of course, I mean the more widely read internets: specificially, the Charlotte Observer's online content. They're featuring my blog this week in their science section. I knew I was going to be in print, but I didn't know I was going to be online, too! Totally cool. Anyhow, go check it out. And you can check out the full version of that blog right here.

You can laugh now....

...but some people knew waaay back then that news will, one day, move from expensive paper to cheap internet: From here TechCrunch surfaced this look at a story that ran back in 1981 that covered how internet news would someday be delivered. At least watch the last 30 seconds. The reporter remarks it would take more than 2 hours to deliver the digital text needed to read the "online newspaper." She added the per minute (i think) charge was around $5 and comments about the difficulty the new approach would have when competing with the .20 cent daily. What's in store for us over the next 30…

Man without fingerprints stumps airport security

USA Today reports the curious case of a Singapore man who was detained for several hours by airport security when they couldn't find his fingerprints. The man, who was taking capecitabine as part of chemotherapy treatment, suffered from hand-foot syndrome, a side effect of the drug where skin peels off. His oncologist describes the unusual case today in an online letter to the Annals of Oncology. The problem is not as rare as you might think. Around one in 50 people in the world lack identifiable fingerprints; an official from the Department of Homeland Security reported "We have standard…

More on graduation rates

In answer to requests from the previous post on graduation rates, here's the same data broken down by race. African Americans still lag whites in graduation rates, but have made impressive gains in high school graduation rates, though graduation appears more likely to be delayed. African Americans are making impressive gains in grad school, but only quite recently. I may try to look at income later, but that's trickier to handle. The societal decline in number of people completing grad school in any subject is declining regardless. I haven't figured out how to separate non-Hispanic whites…

Network-like Mode of Thinking

I am so glad to see that conversations started face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference are now continuing online (see the bottom of the ever-growing linkfests here and here). While some are between science bloggers, as expected, others are between people who have never heard of each other before and who came from very different angles and with different interests. The cross-fertilization we hoped for is happening (and if you had such an experience, let us know)! See, for instance, what a casual chat over lunch at the Conference did to David Warlick - made him think about education…

Uncovering Tobacco Industry Strategies - You Can Help

Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking's health risks. Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia's explanation to learn more about it.) Here's their explanation of the project: The…

Science Cafe Raleigh - Darwin lives on: how gene-environment interactions affect modern society

This month's Science Cafe (description below) will be held on March 24th at Tir Na Nog. Our speaker is Dr. David Reif from the US Environmental Protection Agency. That evening we will be talking about the interplay between our genetic makeup and our environment & lifestyles. We will also discuss human genetics with a focus on evolutionary theory. Here is a link (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879213,00.html#) to an interesting article by a popular author, Carl Zimmer that you might find fun to read. The article gives some background on Darwin and the ideas behind his…

The Rude Implements of Savages

A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line): "Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…

Farrell on Wikipedia

Sorry for the light blogging lately. I'm furiously trying to finish up some writing projects that have been festering for a while. I'm a painfully slow writer, and there's a limit to how many hours a day I can stand pecking away at the computer. Alas, this state of affairs is likely to continue for a while. But, incredibly, the world has not stopped turning during my brief break. So here are a few items for your consideration. First, have a look at this article by John Farrell, about Wikipedia: A car that runs on water, a new form of energy derived from 'hydrinos', a 'cognitive-theoretic…

Links for 2010-12-07

Locus Online: Locus Magazine Digital Editions "Starting January 2011, we will be launching our first digital editions of Locus magazine. Subscriptions will be available in, at minimum, PDF format, and we hope to have e-pub and Kindle versions also. We plan to primarily distribute from our own website, though we will be looking into other distribution options as well. Many of our readers have requested digital editions, and we are excited to be able to offer this alternative." (tags: sf books magazines internet publishing) Dropping the turkey to cook it - another method | Wired Science |…

Question of the Week #4, Followup

Here I answered out overlord's question of the week, namely: Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies? This press release is therefore particularly apt: Americans support free access to research Poll results show overwhelming majority believes federally funded research should be publicly available Washington, DC – May 31, 2006 – In an online survey of public attitudes conducted recently and released today by Harris Interactive®, 8 out of 10 (82%)…

The World Science: a virtual Science Cafe

The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website. You may remember that I went to Boston a couple of months ago, as part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings. The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with…

With Data from Multiple Funders, Who Owns the Data? A Real Concern for Microbial Genomics

Doug Natelson raises a good question about when data should be made publicly available: How much public funding triggers the need to make something publicly available? For example, suppose I used NSF funding to buy a coaxial cable for $5 as part of project A. Then, later on, I use that coax in project B, which is funded at the $100K level by a non-public source. I don't think any reasonable person would then argue that all of project B's results should become public domain because of 0.005% public support. When does the obligation kick in? This is actually a fairly common problem in…

Best Science Books 2013: Boing Boing Gift Guide

Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets. From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it. The previous posts for all the 2013 lists are here. This time it's the Boing Boing 2014 Gift Guide. Make: Analog Synthesizers by Ray Wilson Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings Toms…

Wave Your Lighters in the Air Like You Truly, Deeply Care

Blogging will continue to be relatively light for the next few weeks, as I'm currently in a sort of Vacation Interregnum-- as you can tell from the picture posts, we just got back from the Virgin Islands, and at the end of next week, we're heading to Japan for three weeks of tourism and Worldcon. Also, I'm still catching up on stuff that happened when I was out of town last week. As a child of the 80's, though, I can't let jefitoblog's new project pass by without comment: for the month of August, he's posting a Power Ballad of the Day. Notable songs to date include "The Flame" by Cheap Trick…

Healthcare reform roundup: The Turnaround

The healthcare debate in Lincoln, NE, earlier this year. photo: Nat Harnik, AP, via the NY Times The tone of discussions of reform in both Congress and the blogosphere has changed remarkably over the last few days. It's gone from pessimistic to optimistic, and from a sense of retreat and a whittling away of substantive reform toward a careful expansion of reform -- including the inclusion of a public option. Many a slip between cup and lip, of course, and things could (and almost certianly will) bounce around some more yet. But it's certainly getting more interesting. My own short list of…