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Just a quick update on 'framing science'

Matt Nisbet analyses George Will and Chris Mooney responds to some more recent discussions. Matt talks about framing on NPR (listen here) and now they both have an article published in the Washington Post. Also, check out some older articles by Matt and Chris, including this one on CSI and this one in CJR. With this, I will stop adding new links to blogospheric discussion at the bottom of this post (my first - and uber-long one - on the topic) and will start with a clean slate. But you go and check them, as discussions in the comments are still going on at some of those linked blogs.…

Recommendations for OSHA's Gulf Online Sampling Data

It's been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn't quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one industrial hygienist's recommendations for how OSHA can make its online sampling data more useful: After reviewing OSHA's "Keeping Workers Safe During Oil Spill Response and Cleanup Operations" series of websites, I recommend that OSHA improve the information technology capacity of the sites and add…

Senators propose changes to OSH Act

In the U.S. Senate last week, between the debate and the vote on judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced  S. 1580, on behalf of Senator Edward Kennedy, a bill to amend the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.  As far as I can tell, its text is nearly identical to H.R. 2067 , the bill introduced in April by Cong. Lynn Woolsey.  The bills' major provisions are: expanding OSHA coverage to the 8.5 million public sector workers (who are employed by state, county and local governments, and not covered by an OSHA…

Dawkins on Religion and Evolution

My longtime readers know that I have very mixed feelings about Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I certainly recognize that he is quite brilliant both as a scholar and as a writer. His extremely lucid prose has undoubtedly helped millions of laypeople better understand the theory of evolution and the many lines of evidence which support it. On the other hand, I think his outspoken, even militant atheism, too often offered almost as a package deal with evolution without any meaningful distinction made between the two, also drives millions of people away from even attempting such understanding…

Links for 2010-01-18

BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » It seemed like a good idea at the time: The Slushpile Smackdown "The traditional method of sifting slush is in-house - a job usually handed out to a junior because it's time consuming and occasionally injurious to mental well being. Why? Because anyone with a word processor can submit a novel and while many aspiring authors are professional, know how to follow guidelines and are eager to learn, many are just eager. And submit as soon as the last word hits the page, sometimes sooner. They're full of hope and convinced they've just penned the bestest of bestsellers. Cue…

It's official! I'm blogging again! ...

...but actually somewhere else... So what's going on? The short version is that this is a goodbye post. The long version goes a little like this: 1. For a while now, I've been using twitter, primarily as a place to highlight interesting things. It has more or less replaced my blogging output. These tweets are often science-y, visual in nature, and with (of course) the occasional dose of Chewbacca. However, it soon became obvious to me that I should start blogging again so that such things could be compiled: more so because I'm a big fan of using these odd snippets to segue into…

Dividing up the pie

Another thing I meant to call out in the context of the Jupiter-goes-boom event was the nod to data gathered by people who aren't connected to the formal research enterprise save tangentially. This event was first noted by someone not an astronomer by profession, and the article notes that this is hardly the first time astronomers have been scooped. My husband, who is an extremely amateur skygazer and likes to hang out on online astronomy bulletin boards, says that his impression is that astronomers mingle with enthusiasts fairly freely, all things considered, and both sides appear to benefit…

Why we should make a fuss over broken windows

In 1982, criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in The Atlantic Monthly called "Broken Windows." The theory they laid out became known as the Broken Windows Theory. It holds that people are more likely to commit crimes in areas that appear unwatched and uncared for - i.e., "if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken...[because] one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing," as put in the Atlantic article. In other words, perceptions alter…

A tale of two people in two cities, part II

We've met, we've gotten educated, we've gotten married, and almost all in two different cities. Now I've quit my job so I can finish my dissertation, and we live together, what a concept. Okay, year together, blah blah blah. Gardening, working, eating locally, helping each other, all good things. I'm not kidding when I say it was a relief that we still liked each other - I had heard all these horror stories (okay, maybe 2) of academics who lived apart for 25 years, retire and live together and then get divorced because they had never had to live together before. Anyway, there are no…

QIP Talks That Have arXiv Papers

QIP 2010 talks and associated papers if I could find them (amazing how almost all papers for this conference are available, for free, online at one location....also interesting how papers seem to cluster in the 10-12 months of the listings :) ) If anyone has corrections please leave a comment. Monday Daniel Gottesman and Sandy Irani The quantum and classical complexity of translationally invariant tiling and Hamiltonian problems arXiv:0905.2419 Rahul Jain, Iordanis Kerenidis, Greg Kuperberg, Miklos Santha, Or Sattath, and Shengyu Zhang On the power of a unique quantum witness arXiv:0906.…

Lott Lawsuit: around the blogs

Ted Frank has your must read blog post on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt. He has a copy of the complaint and an explanation from Lott: When a book sells well over a million copies this goes beyond a mere debate among academics. To say that other scholars have been unable to replicate one's work is the same thing as fraud. I and other academics have written Levitt asking him to fix his claim. He has been unwilling to do so. I have people approaching me frequently asking if it is true that other scholars can not even replicate my research. Apparently the numerous academic articles in places…

Does tenure cause academic inflexibility?

There's a question-and-answer in The Scientist online [free registration required] entitled "Is Tenure Worth Saving?" The interviewee, Dan Clawson (a tenured sociologist at the University of Massachusetts) goes through some of the history that's all-too-familiar to people who want jobs in academia: to cut money*, universities have been quietly shifting their work, more and more, to non-tenure-track positions. But what about reasons besides money? Does the institution of tenure lead to the accumulation of deadwood**? TS [The Scientist]: Other than the monetary benefits to the university, what…

Genetically profiling the brain: it all ends with dopamine

Earlier today I linked to a Jonah Leher post on food that hooks into the role that dopamine plays in our decision making. Dopamine looms in the neuroscience angle of Jonah's book How We Decide because the chemical's role in cognition is established. Dopamine related genes are often fingered in behavior genetic studies as the causal root of some observed psychological variation. So a new paper in Nature Neuroscience is in perfect position to stand astride the literal slush pile of this research, Prefrontal and striatal dopaminergic genes predict individual differences in exploration and…

And now we start with the tornadoes. Are you ready?

Huxley and I went to Target to look at weather radios and found out that they don't carry them. But the three Target employees that were gathered near the cameras and electronics with whom we inquired were interested to know why we were looking for one. "You're about the tenth person today who has asked about weather radios. What gives?" Apparently they missed Minnesota's National Tornado Appreciation Week, which was yesterday1. And, they had missed the news that we were expecting a bad year for tornadoes. Anyway, Target does not carry weather radios. I didn't really care, because I had…

The American Chemical Society: Paving paradise to put up a parking lot

Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations? There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope. I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…

Best Science Books 2011: The top books of the year!!!!!

Every year for the last several years I've collated and extracted the science books from all the various "best books of the year" lists in different media media outlets. I've done the same this year for books published in 2011! I can tell it's been popular among my readers from the hit stats I see for this blog and from the number of keyword searches on "best science books" or whatnot I see in my analytics program. Back in 2009, I started taking all the lists I could find and tallying up all the "votes" to see which books were mentioned the most times. An interesting exercise, to say the…

Silica exposures in fracking : Over 60 percent of workers may be excessively exposed

At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry,  stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis,  an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…

When manatees crossed the Atlantic

No time for anything new (working on a book chapter and putting the finishing touches to the Tet Zoo book), so here's this, from the archives. NOT properly updated, so please be aware that it's more than four years old... There are three extant manatee species*: Trichechus inunguis of the Amazon Basin, T. manatus of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and US Atlantic coast as far north as Virginia, and T. senegalensis of western Africa. So, how it is that they occur on opposite sides of the Atlantic? [West Indian manatee T. manatus shown here, from wikipedia. This one was photographed in Florida…

Zero

Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised a donor that I'd write an article about the math of zero. I haven't done it yet, because zero is actually a suprisingly deep subject, and I haven't really had time to do the research to do it justice. But in light of the comment thread that got started around [this post][fspog] yesterday, I think it's a good time to do it with whatever I've accumulated now. History --------- We'll start with a bit of history. Yes, there's an actual history to zero! In general, most early number systems didn't have any concept of "zero". Numbers, in early…

Curious about Curiosity?

Here's the last few news reports: August 21: NASA's Curiosity Studies Mars Surroundings, Nears Drive NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been investigating the Martian weather around it and the soil beneath it, as its controllers prepare for the car-size vehicle's first drive on Mars. The rover's weather station, provided by Spain, checks air temperature, ground temperature, air pressure, wind and other variables every hour at the landing site in Gale Crater. On a typical Martian day, or "sol," based on measurements so far in the two-week old mission, air temperatures swing from 28 degrees to…

Amateur Atheists?

That, minus the question mark, is the title of a new article by theologian John Haught in the current issue of The Christian Century. The subtitle is “Why the New Atheism isn't Serious.” Sadly, the article does not seem to be available online. After reading that headline, I was expecting Haught to offer a variation on The Courtier's Reply. Actually, Haught has something different in mind. The serious atheists, in his view, are Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What makes them serious? In this respect the new atheism is very much like the old secular humanism that was rebuked by the hard-…

How do you teach evolution?

I was just turned on to this recent issue of the McGill Journal of Education which has the theme of teaching evolution. It's a must-read for science educators, with articles by UM's own Randy Moore, Robert Pennock, Branch of the NCSE, and Eugenie Scott, and it's all good. I have to call particular attention the article by Massimo Pigliucci, "The evolution-creation wars: why teaching more science just is not enough", mainly because, as I was reading it, I was finding it a little freaky, like he's been reading my mind, or maybe I've been subconsciously catching Pigliucci's psychic emanations.…

Probing the depths of the biosphere

Rarely do I read papers whose title really sums up exactly what is so cool about the study in a succinct way, free of jargon. I think that "First Investigation of the Microbiology of the Deepest Layer of Ocean Crust" does just that. It isn't trying to be sexy... it just is! Examining the microbial communities in the so-called "deep subsurface biosphere" is a relatively new field. Until recently people didn't think there was much, or really any, life deep in Earth's crust. As with many scientific assumptions made before scientists had the opportunity to actually study a new environment...…

Sample swaps at 23andMe: a cautionary tale

Personal genomics company 23andMe has revealed that a lab mix-up resulted in as many as 96 customers receiving the wrong data. If you have a 23andMe account you can see the formal announcement of the problem here, and I've pasted the full text at the end of this post. It appears that a single 96-well plate of customer DNA was affected by the mix-up. This resulted in incorrect results being sent to customers, with alarming consequences in some cases; one mother posted on the 23andMe community about her distress upon discovering that her son's results were incompatible with the rest of the…

What do we need most during a flu pandemic? Zombie quacks!

One of my dear readers just left the internet equivalent of a flaming bag of turd on my bloggy doorstep: Everybody should read this article by Dr. Russell Blaylock http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/03/What-We-H… These are the facts folks, all information is derived from Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Journal of Medicine. Whenever stamping out the flaming bag of poo, it's wise to remember ones shoes may become sullied. Still, how can I…

On dickishness

Not to reopen raw wounds, but reposting my talk from Netroots Nation reminded me of two other sessions I attended, both on the theme of snark and satire. Unfortunately, video from the one I want to talk about today is not yet online. As you'll recall, sciencebloggers and skeptics were really bored over the summer, and to pass the time they got into a fight over whether it was good or bad to be dickish. Those who said "no," generally argued that there's no particular evidence that such behavior is effective at convincing people to join your cause and the peer reviewed literature found dickish…

Natural Cancer Treatments That Work: A wretched hive of scum and quackery

Back in the 1990s when I first dipped my toe into the pool that was Usenet, that massive, wild, and untamed frontier where most online discussion occurred before the rise of the web and later the blogosphere, I was truly a naif. I had no idea--no inkling--of the depths of quackery to which people would sink. If Usenet was my bootcamp that opened my eyes to the seemingly endless varieties of quackery and, in particular, the flavor of quackery that represents anti-vaccine lunacy and "biomedical treatments" for autism, then my graduate education in the battle for science-based medicine began in…

A "holistic" doctor throws a hilariously disingenuous tantrum over board recertification

In the early days of 2016, my attention was drawn to a local antivaccine doctor of whom I’d heard before but never really paid much attention to. What caught my eye was a blog exchange between this “holistic” family practitioner and former Scienceblogs blogger, friend, and local internist Peter Lipson over this physician’s blog posts attacking a local Jewish summer camp for children for its new requirement that campers must be up to date on their vaccinations as a requirement for attending. Not surprisingly, Dr. Lipson took the side of science and refuted the antivaccine nonsense that had…

Flu biology: receptors, II

In the first part of this two parter we summarized some biology background to a new paper that appeared online ahead of print in the FASEB Journal, Yuo et al., "Avian influenza receptor expression in H5N1-infected and noninfected human tissues." The paper addresses an important gap in our knowledge. Are there cells in the human body with appropriately matched receptors for avian flu virus and if so, where are they? Sporadic results in the last few years suggested that cells deep in the human lung (so-called type II pneumocytes) and ciliated cells in the upper respiratory tract might have…

Preserving Food to Reduce Waste

The UN FAO reminds us of the sheer scope of world food waste - 1/3 of all the food produced, most of it produce, goes to waste. While we'll never get food waste to zero, this is a scandal in a world worrying about how it will feed itself. This is not news - the statistics have been similar for a while now. But when it penetrates, it does give people a sense of the scope of the wastage problem. That pasta with broccoli rabe molding in your fridge is really a link to a larger world and cultural problem. The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but…

Farm and Garden Design Class and Memorial Day Family Weekend

I am *still* without full access to my email, although new stuff is at least being forwarded to Eric's account. I apologize profusely for the difficulties, but I know that some people who tried to register either got bounces or got through, but are buried in my gmail account without my having access, so I would ask you to please send again! I'm very, very sorry about this! I'm told (for the fourth day running) that the problem will be resolved by my ISP by tomorrow. Hopefully this time it is actually true. Meanwhile, if you haven't registered for the class, and would like to, I will at…

Now I know where my sparrows go to sleep

I've long had a special interest in the sleeping habits of small birds. In fact, as you'll know if you read the article I published here back in September 2008*, I've covered this issue before. In that article, I noted that at least some passerines secrete themselves away in crevices or thick foliage. I first became really interested in this subject after making one of my greatest natural history 'discoveries': a sleeping Blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus that I encountered while it was tucked deep beneath the broken bark of a tree, just the tip of its tail betraying its presence. I didn't have…

Thank them - they made ScienceOnline'09 possible

ScienceOnline'09, the third annual science communication conference (successor to the 2007 and 2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conferences), was another unqualified success wifi issues notwithstanding. Around 215 scientists, educators, students, journalists and bloggers gathered for three days of activities, meals, sessions and hallway conversations to explore ways to use online tools to promote the public understanding of, and engagement in, science. Find a comprehensive listing of links to the many blog entries and video clips posted before, during and after the conference to learn…

Books I'd Like to Read

It's been quite a long while since I've done one of these. Here are some recently noticed books that look interesting from either a collection development or a professional development point of view. Fans, Friends And Followers: Building An Audience And A Creative Career In The Digital Age by Scott Kirsner An essential guide for filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, and other creative types. "Fans, Friends & Followers" explores the strategies for cultivating an online fan base that can support your creative career, enabling you to do the work you want to do and make a living at it.…

Why I Eat Fish on Fridays

To say I'm a lapsed Catholic would be an understatement. I haven't set foot in a church in years, other than for a couple of weddings. I've never cared for parts of the official doctrine, and I think they blew it when they made Giblets Pope. In terms of general attitude toward religion, I'm sort of an apathetic agnostic-- I don't know if there's a God, and I don't much care. And yet, I make at least some effort to not eat meat on Fridays during Lent. I don't do all that well, because I'm a little absent-minded (I usually forget it's Friday until I'm halfway through a cheeseeburger), but I do…

Muller is still rubbish

When BEST first came out I said it was boring, because it just said what everyone knew already "Summary: the global temperature record is just what we thought it was". There was some soap opera thrown in for fun, but that didn't affect the science. But now (New Global Temperature Data Reanalysis Confirms Warming, Blames CO2, Ronald Bailey at reason.com, h/t JB at RR) it seems that Muller is announcing his "new" findings via op-ed in the NYT [Important note: reason.com isn't exactly a brilliant source, but I can't see a good reason why they'd make this up. Update: the real thing is now…

14 Years Before the Class(room)

This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on my experiences to this point, which in turn is a good excuse for a blog post. So, here are some things I've found out over the last 14 years of being a college professor: -- Teaching is really hard. My first year, when colleagues from other schools asked how I was…

Ask Ethan #4: Weird Astronomy Maps

"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it." -Steven Wright So just because the Ask Ethan series is becoming way more popular than I can handle -- I've got more than 200 questions that I'm sitting on by now -- doesn't mean you should stop sending your questions! There are some really good ones, and today's comes from Robert Plotner, who asks: When maps of the CMB are depicted, they are shown as a flattened ovoid. How does this correlate to our view of the sky which is a sphere? For example, a global map of the Earth is either distorted to show it in two dimensions…

March Pieces Of My Mind #1

Oh fuck. I just installed the operating system update/trojan that makes this particular Samsung smartphone model slow. I wonder how classical liberalism views labour unions. On the one hand, the right to form one is clearly a civil liberty. On the other hand, it can be seen as what Smith called a "conspiracy of businessmen", or in modern parliance, a price cartel. Jrette approvingly recommends me to check out pics of curvaceous model Denise Bidot. I have to tell her that though Bidot is indeed beautiful, I'm not quite comfortable looking at pics of her in Jrette's company. Movie: Pride.…

The Pseudonymity Laboratory: Up from the Comments

Wow. Thank you, dear Terra Sig readers, for your thoughtful responses to our first query about the concept of blogger pseudonymity. For background, I have threatened to reveal myself (in text, not photographically) and wished to use this opportunity to provide grist for a session led by me, PalMD, and several women bloggers on the sci/med blogging under a pseudonym at ScienceOnline'09 on 17 Jan 2009 at Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA. Just as many people might be frightened by me uncloaking in meatspace, readers have responded that…

The new palmistry

I am a gorgeous hunk of virile manhood. How do I know? I looked at my fingers. Research has shown that men whose ring finger on their right hand is longer than their index finger are regarded as better looking by women, possibly because their faces are more symmetrical. There is no link, however, between this finger length and how alluring women find a man's voice or his body odour, the study found. Guys, you may be looking at my picture on the sidebar and thinking there must be something wrong here…but no, I assure you, my right ring finger is distinctly longer than my right index finger…

Optogenetics controls brain signalling and sheds light on Parkinson's therapy

Optogenetics is a newly developed technique based on a group of light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which were isolated recently from various species of micro-organism. Although relatively new, this technique has already proven to be extremely powerful, because channelrhodopsins can be targeted to specific cells, so that their activity can be controlled by light, on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale. A group of researchers from Stanford University now report a new addition to the optogenetic toolkit, and demonstrate that it can be used to precisely control biochemical…

Hemisphericity of Inhibition May Change With Age

"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?" - Alan Turing (Computing Machinery, p456) One of the defining features of childhood cognition is "behaving without thinking." Not surprisingly, developmental cognitive psychology has latched onto the idea of impulse control - and other processes putatively requiring inhibition - as a central explanatory construct, playing a role in attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and everything in between (including developmental trends in normal…

Bloggers are just 19th-century newspaper editors with laptops, LOLcats, and the occasional man-bat

I perversely love attending conferences where traditional journalists complain that bloggers are evil. :) Yesterday I heard that line again (in jest, relax) at a great discussion about changing media practices and the legal implications of various forms of content reuse, sponsored by the Online Media Legal Network. But the focus was a little bit different: are "new media" practices really that new? Historians know that almost two centuries ago, rival newspapers reprinted one another's content freely - often with snarky commentary, and nary a licensing fee or permission. Fact-checking fell by…

Do Antidepressants Increase Suicide Risk?

This is kind of an old story, I know.  Still, every once in a while it is good to revisit these things.  When the topic first came up in 2004, it was the subject of much newspaper space and blog commentary.  But now, it has pretty much faded from the national consciousness.  Has anything more come of it? In a recent editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Gregory E. Simon, M.D., M.P.H., reviews the largest and most informative studies on the subject: href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/163/11/1861"> href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/…

This Week In The Global Climate Scene

A whole sack full of news on climate this week. Yesterday, I enjoyed an excellent talk delivered by Joaquim Goes from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. He provided rather convincing data that the Arabian Sea is undergoing an oceanographic shift. Eurasian warming is triggering a decline in snow across the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau region. This in turn results in atypically strong southwest monsoon (SWM) winds and enhanced wind-driven upwelling off the coasts of Somalia, Oman, and Yemen. The effect is a drastically increased phytoplankton bloom in the western and central regions of the…

If the science pipeline breaks, the rest of us get hurt, too.

A bunch of other bloggers are discussing the recent statement A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk (PDF). I thought I'd say something about the complexities of the situation, and about why non-scientists (whose tax dollars support scientific research funded by the NIH and other government agencies) should care. The general idea behind funding scientific research with public monies is that such research is expected to produce knowledge that will benefit society. There are problems that non-scientists cannot solve on their own, so we pony up the…

Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 8).

After considering the many different roadblocks that seems to appear when people try to discuss research with animals (as we did in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this series), it might be tempting to throw up your hands and say, "Well, I guess there's no point in doing that, then!" Resist this temptation! As we noted in part 7, there are good reasons that we (by which I mean scientists and the public) ought to be engaging in dialogue about issues like research with animals. Avoiding dialogue altogether would mean cutting off the flow of information about what actually happens in animal…

Should pro-vaccine advocates try to get on The Oprah Winfrey Show?

Oprah Winfrey supports quackery. That has been richly demonstrated over the last few years, particularly with her gauzy, praise-filled segments featuring such pro-woo luminaries as Jenny McCarthy, her frequently having physicians boosters of "alternative medicine" like Mehmet Oz and Christiane Northrup on her show, and her tight embrace of New Age "spirituality." Alarmed at the antivaccination nonsense being pushed on Oprah's show, Every Child By Two has been circulating an e-mail: Please Take The Time To Contact The Oprah Winfrey Show It has been quite some time since Every Child By Two (…

Blogging in Academia: What Can It Do For You?

[Below is a longer, less edited version of an article I wrote for my department newsletter this month.] Is science blogging something that belongs to Science or to Journalism? Clearly more and more scientists are communicating online. In a time when mainstream media are obliterating their science departments, science blogging is growing, and the few science journalists left are increasingly turning to science blogs for story ideas. And so is the general public. A recent press release from ScienceBlogs indicated that the network, the top social media network in the science category, had…