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Thought of the Day: A Virtual Walden's Pond?

With the virtues that online social networking may offer for education, a thought for today is to consider a strategy to give yourself a respite from the frantic, nonstop pace of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and any other virtual world that sucks you in. A curious new software (counterculture?) called "Anti-Social*" has emerged that offers the user this: "You'll choose an allotment of time for Anti-Social to block your access to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and whatever else you deem distracting (LOLdawgz.org), decide whether you'll need access to your email, and then start the fade to…

Just who are you, anyway? Personas.

I don't often point people to online game-like interactive thingies, but this one has my endorsement. Give yourself a few minutes to watch the process. It can be gruesome: Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Click here to get started. If it is…

The Essence of Online Science Journalism

The Essence of Online Science Journalism View more presentations from miriamboon. From a lecture by Miriam Boon

Revelations in tower antenna worker's death

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Celeste Monforton, originally posted 12/16/09 In April-May 2008, there were a spate of fatalities involving workers doing installations or maintenance on cell phone towers. I blogged about seven of these worker deaths and promised to report back on the outcome of the Federal or State OSHA investigations. Of the seven fatal incidents, three resulted in informal settlements of serious violations with penalties ranging from $2,100 to $4,900; and two investigations resulted in no citations or penalties,…

Recent Presentations: Getting Your Science Online and Evaluating Information

As I mentioned way back on October 22nd, I was kindly invited to give a talk at the Brock University Physics Department as part of their seminar series. The talk was on Getting Your Science Online, a topic that I'm somewhat familiar with! Since it was coincidentally Open Access Week, I did kind of an A-Z of online science starting with the various open movements: access, data and notebooks. From there I did a quick tour of the whys and wherefores of blogs and Twitter. There was a good turnout of faculty and grad students with lots of great questions and feedback, some more skeptical that…

Info about the way OA benefits conservation is itself not OA

How free access internet resources benefit biodiversity and conservation research: Trinidad and Tobago's endemic plants and their conservation status: Botanists have been urged to help assess the conservation status of all known plant species. For resource-poor and biodiversity-rich countries such assessments are scarce because of a lack of, and access to, information. However, the wide range of biodiversity and geographical resources that are now freely available on the internet, together with local herbarium data, can provide sufficient information to assess the conservation status of…

Scientific publishing

For reasons which I may or may not reveal some day, I'm interested in picking your collective brains about the future of online scientific publishing. My premises are as follows: I do not read printed scientific journals any more – they waste space and are hard to search through when I'm looking for a specific paper, let alone a general concept. You probably don't read print journals any more either. If you do, neither you nor anyone else will still be reading print journals in, say, 5 years. Electronic editions of journals are still not quite as useable as they ought to be for authors or…

From Washington to the Nation

The state of Washington may soon not be alone in its ban on internet gaming. Republicans in the House are pushing a bill to make that ban nationwide. The bill has made it through committee and will be coming to a floor vote this summer. And predictably, they're trying to sell the bill with two marketing campaigns. The first, of course, is "values": The majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, announced a few days ago that the measure would be voted on this summer as part of what the Republicans call their American Values Agenda. The "American Values Agenda", of…

We Can Solve It? Forthcoming Paper on Opinion-Leaders and Climate Change

Opinion-leaders are a commonly overlooked resource by science organizations and advocates. Public communication initiatives too often ignore the special individuals across communities and social groups that can serve as vital go-betweens and information brokers, passing on messages about an issue such as climate change that can speak directly to their otherwise inattentive peers, co-workers, and friends. In a forthcoming article at the journal Science Communication, we synthesize past research from politics, marketing, and public health, presenting a toolbox of concepts, measures, and…

Karl Schroeder, Sun of Suns [Library of Babel]

I am totally mystified by the vagaries of the publishing industry. Karl Schroeder's latest novel, Sun of Suns apparently came out back in October, but I can't recall ever seeing a copy in a bookstore. I think I would remember it, because he's on my "buy immediately" list after Permanence and Lady of Mazes. And it's a Tor book, too-- their stuff is usually easy to find. I expect this "In print but instantly unavailable" crap from Ace, but Tor's usually reliable. Anyway, I ended up getting this from the local library, and I'll probably buy a copy this weekend at Boskone. As I expected from the…

The new issue of Journal of Science Communication is now published

The new issue of Journal of Science Communication is now online (Open Access, so you can download all PDFs for free). Apart from the article on blogging that we already dissected at length, this issue has a number of interesting articles, reviews, perspectives and papers: Users and peers. From citizen science to P2P science: This introduction presents the essays belonging to the JCOM special issue on User-led and peer-to-peer science. It also draws a first map of the main problems we need to investigate when we face this new and emerging phenomenon. Web tools are enacting and facilitating new…

DRM: The sky does fall

DRM stands for "digital restrictions management". (Those who are in the business of peddling it as something positive will tell you it's "digital rights management," but the former is really a better descriptive name.) It is software that prevents you from using some other software or digital files on your computer unless you meet certain criteria. DRM has actually been with us for a long time. Back in the 1980's, games and other software you could buy for your Apple II or Commodore 64 came with "copy protection." These were tricks that the software publishers would use to make it…

Some comments on data and data reproduction.

Part of the problem with Science is the verification process. From the outside looking in, you may guess that there is a quick and easy solution ... data should be reproduced by others. In the end scientists should be concerned with the facts. Alejandro Rivero comments on my entry on being scooped: What do you mean by "Being scooped"? If the paper that comes out coincides with your research, that is good, shouldn't it be?. If it proofs that your research line is a failure, then really your work has been useless. In response to my entry on Nature's new and experimental Peer review system,…

Revolutionary Minds Think Tank

ScienceBlogs has indulged in a variety of online experiments to help make science and scientists more accessible to the public. On one hand, many scientific fields are complex and difficult to explain to the public, but on the other hand, scientists possess a lot of practical knowledge and skills that are useful to the public and, if asked, they can help the public think creatively and proactively about the many problems that face modern society. In my opinion, one of the best of these online experiments is the fledgling blog, Revolutionary Minds Think Tank. Besides having lots of fun blog…

More Godless Blogging of the Week

Out in the real world, especially in the Red States and the Bible Belt, atheists tend to go on with their lives without actively tooting their horns every day everywhere. But online, the Internets are teeming with atheists suggesting that there may be more of us in the general population than what the various censuses show, even if one controls for such things as self-selection, i.e., repressed atheists tending to vent their atheism online if prohibited from doing so offline. The Carnival of the Godless has been going on for some time now and it has grown really big, to the point of…

What should be the title of the Science Blogging Anthology?

Here is the background information and here is the growing list of nominations. I am still looking for a poem, a post about women and/or minorities in science, something from chemistry, geology and/or ecology (not environment/conservation), and a post about stereotypes of scientists in the society (e.g., movies, TV). I have realized that having an online poll and asking people to evaluate 100+ posts will be too unwieldy, so instead I asked several of my friends, including a couple of SciBlings, several science bloggers not affiliated with Seed, a non-science blogger and a non-blogging…

SteelyKid, Life Scientist

It's been a rough week, so here's some cute-kid stuff. The "featured image" above is a giant picture from SteelyKid's after-school day care, where they're talking about bodies and bones. It's a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what I think are meant to be nerves. This is all up to date with the very latest kindergarten medical science. She's even written books about it: SteelyKid's medical books We wanted to get a good picture of her for the jacket copy, but alas, she's too busy doing archival…

TheScian SF Contest 2009 Results

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all the participants. The stories will go online at TheScian.com within a few days. First prize - "Stalker" by Shuchikar (author's penname) Second prize - "On board the Ark" by Ankit Bhardwaj Third prize - "Dropping Off" by Ramanand I am pleased to say that all three stories have a darker theme than most of the earlier years' stories. This is good. We are moving beyond the initial awe-and-wonder phase of SF into more mature and adult themes. More on these later after I get them online. The work on the SF book is proceeding at a steady pace. As of…

"YouTube! That's why I became a writer!"

"Book Launch 2.0" This kills me -- but maybe just because I've written books. (Oh yeah -- the links to the books. First two here. Reef Madness here. Buy 'em. Read 'em. They're better than the stuff you're reading now.) This video should follow or be followed by Ellis Weiner's "Our Marketing Plan" from the New Yorker: Once we get back from Frankfurt, weâd like to see you on morning talk shows like the âTodayâ show and âThe View,â so please get yourself booked on them and keep us âin the loop.â If Iâm not hereâwhich I wonât be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeksâjust…

Letter to the Past

Inspired by a thread at Fark, John Lynch asks an interesting question: If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be? Janet has some thoughts as well. Leaving aside obvious stuff like "Buy Microsoft stock," what I would say to my twelve-year-old self is this: Get over yourself. (Continued...) You're not getting picked on in school because your classmates are jealous that you're smarter than they are (nerd apologia notwithstanding). You're getting picked on because you're annoying about it. You can be the smartest guy in the room without rubbing it…

BONK!

I rarely ever go to a place like Barnes and Noble to buy books, but a few months ago I had a gift card that burning a hole in my pocket. The question was what to buy. As always I browsed through the science section and didn't see much of interest. Most of the titles available were about subjects I was already familiar with or didn't strike my fancy. I was just about to head home when I spotted Mary Roach's book SPOOK. It wasn't typical reading fare for me, but I remembered hearing good things about it. When I got home I started in on it and could not put it down. I even read the whole thing…

Mike Reedy's lowbrow anatomy

Michael Reedy's drawings are like 1980s Visual Man and Woman models plopped down in a half-excavated quarry of visual and literary allusions. He achieves a cut-paper, graphic feel by composing on superimposed planes, sort of like a stage set, with strategic uses of outlining and negative space. And he is a master of figure drawing (he teaches it, so he'd better be). When an artist really knows figural anatomy, he/she doesn't need to do anything flashy with it: you can just tell. While it's not one of the overtly anatomical drawings (like malum E, above), I'm totally captivated by Blash, a…

Goldmund Media Rooms

In the great role-playing game of life, I did not get very many audiophile points.  I mean, fine machinery is something I can appreciate, but I'm pretty indifferent to the sounds those machines make.   So it strikes me as remarkable that anyone would make, much less buy, a $300,000 turntable.   No, you can't go into a store and buy one.  You can't even get one on the Internet.  If you want one, you have to make an appointment. They are made by a Swiss company, href="http://www.goldmund.com/company/" rel="tag">Goldmund.  The turntable is called the Reference II.  They've only made 25…

Are Mac Owners More Pretentious?

Being a (very) recent convert to the World of Mac, it is with great interest that I read a provocative report by Mindset Media comparing the behavior of Mac-owners vs. PC-owners--specifically, who was snobbier? Mindset surveyed 7500 Mac and PC-owners and found that Mac users were more self-important, intellectually curious, and felt themselves to be extraordinary and superior. Mac users are more likely to use teeth-whitening kits (vanity!), buy organic food, be politically liberal, be willing to pay more for green technology, buy a hybrid car, drink Starbucks, and have bought more than 5…

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Mortgage Basics (part 2): The System is Broken.

This is the second part of my series trying to answer peoples questions about how mortgages work, and what went wrong. In the first part, I described what a mortgage is, and how it works. In this part, I'm going to describe the mortgage system - that is, the collection of people and organizations involved in the business of mortgages, how they interact with one another, and how that system has gotten into trouble. The next and final part will be from the viewpoint of a homeowner who is taking or has taken out a mortgage to purchase a home, and what can go wrong from their side. I'll…

Online publishing, new way of peer-reviewing, and blogs

Rethinking Peer Review: In reality, peer review is a fairly recent innovation, not widespread until the middle of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, many science journals were commandingly led by what Ohio State University science historian John C. Burnham dubbed "crusading and colorful editors," who made their publications "personal mouthpieces" for their individual views. There were often more journals than scientific and medical papers to publish; the last thing needed was a process for weeding out articles. In time, the specialization of science precluded editors from being…

Blogs - a means to finding people to do rhythmic things with?

I found this quite intriguing: Those thinking that online social networking is a substitute for face-to-face interactions might want to think again. Recent research in psychology suggests there are some benefits to real-life socializing that the Internet just can't provide; researchers at Stanford University have published a report in Psychological Science called "Synchrony and Cooperation" that indicates engaging in synchronous activities (e.g., marching, singing, dancing) strengthens social attachments and enables cooperation. As most of our online social networking to date is based on…

On the future of scientific communication

Dipterist extraordinaire David Yeates writes: If accepted, a recently proposed amendment to the ICZN allows for electronic publication of taxonomic names.... [T]he logical implications of this proposal are many and far reaching. For example, this change may lead to further advances so that zoological taxonomy bypasses traditional journal publication entirely... I agree with Yeates.  Taxonomy will migrate from paper journals to online databases, and this will happen sooner rather than later.  But I think it worth noting that this is reflective of a broader change in scientific communication…

Mark your calendars for the Great Backyard Bird Count.

The 12th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, will be taking place February 13-16, 2009. This is a lovely (and long-running) bit of citizen science that aims to compile a continent-wide snapshot of bird populations during a few days in February before the spring migrations have started. Participation is easy: Plan to spend at least 15 minutes on at least one of the days of the count (Feb. 13, Feb. 14, Feb. 15, or Feb. 16) outdoors counting birds. You can do a count on more than one of the days if you want, and you…

Selling indulgences for environmental sin

One of the gross abuses that triggered the Reformation was the corrupt practice of Catholic priests of selling "indulgences," get-out-of-jail free cards for your sins in this world. Since the Bush administration is always willing to learn from history where corruption is the prize, they have come up with a new idea to sell climate change indulgences to a public increasingly worried about how today's sins will punish their grandchildren. This latest Bush administration proposal for offsetting the build-up of greenhouse gases characteristically (for them) doesn't operate on the source side --…

Bird Magic

My wife and kids went to the beach last week. When they returned they gave me a present. Frankly, I wasn't expecting a present at all, so I found it funny that they felt apprehensive that I woud not like the present as it was cheap. Then I opened it, and it was.... ...the Drinking Happy Bird!!!! I love it! I always wanted to have one. A craftsman of some sort (watch repair, glass-cutting?) down the street where I grew up had one displayed in his shop window. It was big (about 20cm long) and the legs and stuff were made of metal. It took me a few minutes to get it set up and working…

If you don't stop doing that, you'll go extinct!

Those darned Christians are always ruining our fun. Now we're getting preemptive finger-wagging: we have been warned that sex with robots is always wrong. The author is afraid we're going to someday run out and buy life-like android sex slaves, and then humanity will go extinct…because of course we'd all prefer to have sex with a perfect Christian woman an obedient, unquestioning, subservient machine. (Shhh. While he's busy looking for androids to cluck over, don't let him know that the sex machines are already here. They aren't humanoid at all. They tend to have shapes that vary from simple…

Great Math Music

By way of PZ, I just found [the website of Jonathan Coulton](http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs/), a musician who seems to specialize in humorous and geeky songs. The music is good; the lyrics are absolutely fantastic. Here's an example that he gives away, called "Mandelbrot Set". (For embedding it here, I drastically stripped it from 160K stereo sample to just 16K mono; go to his homepage to get the real, full-quality version.) Just to give you an idea, here's the lyrics for the first verse: Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician Every one of them is a splinter in my…

no money, no cheerios

head of major supermarket in Iceland encourages people to hoard food and to stop buying foreign products no currency for food imports this is a cultural catastrophe, no more cheerios for breakfast, the kids will have to eat skyr CEO of Bonus, a major Icelandic grocery market says their foreign wholesalers are refusing lines of credit through Icelandic banks and demanding cash payment before supplying further goods. The store has been refused foreign currency. This was 4 pm friday afternoon. He encourages people to hoard food and to start buying locally produced goods only. I guess the…

Yet more sea ice

Continuing from Three views of sea ice. Well, tis now mid-June, so the futurology aspect of the prediction is closing rapidly. Or so you would have thought. I've just taken £50 against CR for the ice being below 4.735 (he gets the low side) or above 4.935 (I get the high side). But my principal debt on sea ice is failing to write anything more about it. so, to remedy that! I was going to suggest that the most interesting way of doing the pool was via Intrade. Unfortunately their Arctic sea ice pool doesn't look very interesting. The bet is "2010 greater than 2009" and is trading at around 43…

Jiggitty Jig

We're home again, at last. Actually, the power came on not quite 24 hours ago, but by the time we learned it was back, we were settled in for the night at the hotel. And it would've taken several hours for the house to warm back up from its sub-40-Fahrenheit temperature to a temperature at which SteelyKid would be comfortable. We've been back in the house since about 10 am, though. Of course, there was much too much to do to read blogs, let alone post anything-- spoiled food to throw out, replacement food to be obtained, more diapers to buy, a Christmas tree to acquire, etc., etc. The…

Krugman: I'm For Math!

Krugman clarifies: I've been getting some comments from people who think my magazine piece was an attack on the use of mathematics in economics. It wasn't...So by all means let's have math in economics -- but as our servant, not our master. Word. (Of course the point I was trying to make was that I read the end of his article as suggesting that because economics must deal with the irrational and unpredictable behavior of humans, that it must therefor be messy and beyond elegant mathematical description. I don't buy this line of reasoning, as I think it is unknown whether the conclusion is…

Reading Diary: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein

We live in a k-cup culture. Focused on the near term but willfully blind to the longer term implications of our daily decisions. Just before the holidays I was watching the CBC TV show Power and Politics and they were discussing a bunch of "Top 5s" in an end-of year story. You know the type, the Top 5 this's and that's from the previous year, 2014, as well as a couple looking ahead to 2015. With a federal election scheduled in 2015, were the top 5 election issues that Canada that Canadians should keep on their radar in the coming year? Economy/Jobs Leadership/Ethics Energy/Climate Change…

Rant on Scientific Journals: Reply from Nature Mag.

About two weeks ago I wrote an entry on what I hated about scientific journals. I intentionally did not include the issue of public access to publicly financed research, but it came up in the comment section. Interestingly Maxine, an editor at Nature, replied: On the access problem mentioned here in the comments -- can't speak for other publishers but institutions almost always have site-license access to Nature which gives complete online access. Nature ran a debate on this topic a while back which is free-access and can be see at: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/index.html…

Weblog awards

I don't like the way the Weblog awards are decided. Because you can vote once per day per computer you have access to, to win bloggers need to post every day and shamelessly exhort their readers to vote. This felt wrong to me, so when I was a finalist in 2005 and 2006 I ignored the whole thing. But this year I'm not a finalist, so I'm asking you to vote for a couple of blogs. In the Funniest Blog category, a truly vile blog called DUmmie FUnnies must not win. There was an on-line appeal to raise money to pay for medical care for someone called Andy Stephenson, who was suffering from…

Journalism wrap-up from ScienceOnline2010

The complete list of blog/media coverage of ScienceOnline2010 is becoming huge (and also swiftly falling down and off the page), but I wanted to put up on top just a choice of blog posts that completely or partially cover the 'journalism and media track' of session at the meeting, as I found them very insightful. I know, there were many other topics at the meeting, and blog posts covering them, but I feel the discussion of science in the media and journalism was the leitmotif of this year's meeting and it brought about some of the liveliest sessions and most interesting posts (not just for…

Nature Lets It All Hang Out Through Open Peer Review

One of the fundamental principles of modern science, as well as other academic pursuits, is peer review. By subjecting a submitted paper to evaluation by other scientists in the authors' field, the solid science advances at the expense of the not-so-good and the interesting and relevant prevails above the unoriginal. In theory, of course. The effect is a growing body of scientific knowledge that, while still large and unwieldy, is at best authoritative and at the very least trustworthy and accurate. It's a kind of democratization of knowledge, at least in a narrow sense. But, as in any…

The Netroots Candidate

If you read the papers or watched TV today, you may have gotten the impression that Edwards announced his run this morning around 9am in front of TV cameras. Wrong! The MSM folks think they still matter and are blind to everything happening outside of their domain. The first people he directly announced to were about 20 of us bloggers on a teleconference phone call last night around 7pm. Soon afterwards, his campaign posted this video on YouTube, soon followed by the launch of his website. Then, after the NOLA announcement, he spent about two hours on DailyKos answering questions from more…

On My Mind Right Now

My landscape students in Växjö did extremely well on the exam: 79% passed with distinction. And they were extremely kind in their evaluation of the course, which took place before the exam. I've been put in charge of an on-line course in upplevelseproduktion, tourist site production, and so will spend the entire academic year of '12/13 as an employee of the Linnæus University at 20-25% of full time. Yay! My buddy Martin is sending me the manuscript of his new novel for test reading. Fornvännen's autumn issue just came from the printers with a lot of good stuff, and we're handing the winter…

More thoughts on a workable library ebook business model

A while back I posted some semi-coherent ramblings inspired by the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess concerning how libraries were able to license ebook collections for their patrons. I'm not sure my ideas have changed or solidified or evolved or what, but I've certainly come to a slightly different way of articulating them. Here goes. At a certain level, libraries -- public, academic, institutional, special, whatever -- lending ebooks makes no sense at all. If a library acquires a digital copy of a book there is no good reason why every person in that library's community (school, town, city,…

The Computer Industry Is Making Us Crazy

We had a meeting yesterday with the chair of the CS department, who wanted to know about our computing needs. Sadly, she just meant that she wanted to know what computing things we would like our students to be taught, because my real computing need, as I said to Kate last night, is "I need the entire computer industry to operate on a different paradigm than it does now, because the current system is making everyone miserable." I was half joking, but not entirely. I genuinely am annoyed at the whole way the industry operates, because planned obsolescence means that I am constantly being…

Goodbye: Dusky Seaside Sparrow

tags: Dusky Seaside Sparrow, Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day The world in a jar: Is this the sort of world we wish to leave to our children? Dusky Seaside Sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens). Extinct. Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes; Slipping into extinction almost unnoticed, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow, Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens -- found mainly on Florida's Merritt Island -- declined from roughly 3,000 pairs to none as its salt marsh habitat was sprayed with DDT and taken over for…

Around the Web: Becoming Internet famous, Why some academics publish more and, er, more

Finding Fame, and Sometimes Fortune, in Social Media Why Some Academics Publish More Why book bloggers are critical to literary criticism On Becoming a Phoenix: Encounters With the Digital Revolution (trying an online course at UPhoenix) A Pioneer in Online Education Tries a MOOC FriendFeed Turns 5. The One-Time Pioneer Is Still Here. The Financial Burdens of the CC-BY License for Scholarly Literature Will Public Libraries Become Extinct? It will be hard to find a public library 15 years from now 2012 Digital Music Sales on Pace to Break Record MLA to Launch Scholarly Communications Platform…