Blogging
clock | April 12, 2010Go say Hello to Jason Goldman, the proprietor of the newest addition to the Scienceblogs Borg, over at The Thoughtful Animal. To see more of his stuff, take a look at his old blog.
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2010The 90th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at A Hot Cup of Joe on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Carl, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
clock | April 11, 2010Yesterday, Jay Rosen on Twitter wrote that his goal on Twitter was to have "a Twitter feed that is 100 percent personal (my own view on things...) and zero percent private."
This is an excellent description of mindcasting. Its alternative, 'lifecasting' is 100% private made public.
There is nothing wrong with lifecasting, of course. It is a different style of communication. It is using Twitter with a different goal in mind.
Mindcasting is a method to use Twitter for exchange of news, information, analysis and opinion.
Lifecasting is a method to use Twitter to make friends and communicate…
awild | April 7, 2010If you've been following the Taxonomy Fail and subsequent Myrmecology Win, you'll know that the real Fail was my own. That blurry mash of legs and cuticle is indeed an ant, and I missed it.
That I failed to discern an ant in the original image doesn't bother me. After all, the photo was the equivalent of an amber inkblot, with key bits out of focus, and the paper itself provided no support for the identification. I stand by my comments about the burden of proof lying with the authors- the paper did not adequately justify its conclusions. Partly, this is less the fault of the authors than the…
clock | April 5, 2010Long-time observers of the progressive blogopshere are likely aware of Barbara O' Brien and her blogging at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and elsewhere. She was a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC.
Now, Barbara has a new project - Mesothelioma Blog - where she is dissecting the Health Care Bill, the public concern of health care, and related issues in health care in the United States. The topics include health reform, public health, and asbestos contamination.. Check out Mesothelioma Blog…
clock | April 4, 2010In his ongoing series, Colin Schultz posted two excellent interviews, with Ferris Jabr and with Ed Yong. Both interviews are long-ish, and cover a lot of ground, e.g., about the importance of the "news hook" for science stories, the role of PIOs and press release sites, and the useless blogging vs. journalism wars.
clock | April 4, 2010This blog was reviewed by Dr Justin Marley at The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Psychiatry Blog. Check it out.
awild | April 3, 2010We're hosting a party for the roller derby girls, so I'm otherwise preoccupied today. Help yourself to some links, though:
Mark Moffett, the quintessential National Geographic bug photographer, has a new ant book.
Margaret Atwood (yes, that Margaret Atwood), reviews E. O. Wilson's novel.
Carl Zimmer suffers genome fatigue.
Mantis shrimp glow in the dark.
Who wants to help Tim Eisele identify his mystery ants?
emjohnson | April 2, 2010The monthly Carnival of Evolution is now up at Beetles in the Bush. Ted has done a terrific job of putting together some of the best science writing on the web. Make sure to stop on by and thank him for another great edition.
This month brings newcomer Chadrick Lane with his blog The Ancestral Mind and many familiar voices from Living the Scientific Life, Evolving Thoughts, Mauka to Makai, Deep Thoughts and Silliness, NeuroDojo, Lab Rat, Pleiotropy and many more.
clock | April 1, 2010.....was just announced on the everyONE blog so go ahead and click right here and go see who won this month's prize.
jstemwedel | April 1, 2010Observant readers will have noticed that three of my last four posts -- the ones sporting the spiffy Research Blogging icon -- were posts discussing peer-reviewed journal articles. This is a substantially higher proportion of writing about the details of scholarly research than I normally feature on this blog.
But I think I've developed a taste for it.
Thus, going forward, I've decided (for the foreseeable future, anyway) to stick to discussions of scholarly research and to set aside freewheeling musings on current events, answers to emailed requests for advice, passing observations of…
emjohnson | March 31, 2010
I've got several imminent deadlines which means that my blog time is limited just now. However, there have been a few interesting posts that I thought I'd refer you to.
Orac has a review of a new study showing that publication bias can result in some animal research studies.
So, basically, all we can conclude from this study is that, for one intervention and one type of animal model, there appears to be publication bias, the effect of which can only be very roughly estimated and which varies depending upon which intervention is studied. It is unknown whether publication bias exists for…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2010The 89th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Greg Laden's blog on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Greg, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
emjohnson | March 27, 2010"But Dr. Zaius, the benefits to apedom far outweigh this animal's suffering."
Image: Planet of the Apes
Greg Laden has posted three parts (with more on the way) of a series that looks at how we should decide what animals have rights, what those rights should be, and how we weigh those considerations against the benefits of animal testing:
It is not entirely unreasonable to view the question of what humans can do to other species with suspicion. This would be the same kind of suspicion that a parole board would level against an inmate asking for release. We are a species with a record, and we…
clock | March 26, 2010Now that this blog has won the ResearchBlogging.org Award in the Biology category, people are coming here and looking for biology posts. And on a blog with almost 10,000 posts, they may not be easy to find. So, I put together a collection of posts that I think are decent under the fold. Different lengths, styles, topics, reading-levels - hopefully something for everyone:
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
Some hypotheses about a possible connection between malaria…
clock | March 26, 2010If you are a regular reader of Scienceblogs.com, you have probably already learned that two of our blogs have moved over to Discover blogs.
Razib of Gene Expression has moved from here to his new digs over there. Read his Goodbye post on Sb and his Welcome post over at Discover.
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science has moved from here to his new digs over there. Read his Goodbye post on Sb and his Welcome post over at Discover.
Razib and Ed are joining the small but elite blogging network, backed by the well-known Discover brand, the likes of Carl Zimmer, Phil Plait, Sean Carrol et al.,…
laelaps | March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
awild | March 24, 2010What was that dashing bug in pastel colors? As so many of you picked, it's a palmetto planthopper.
Order: Hemiptera
Family: Flatidae
Genus: Ormenaria
Species: rufifascia
Points are awarded as follows:
James Trager: 8 points
Chris Grinter: 5 points
And, one point each for TGIQ, Pete Yeeles, and Ted MacRae for providing additional information including suborder and species year & author.
clock | March 24, 2010I was in Boston last two days, and mostly offline, so the news of the announcements of ResearchBlogging.org Awards found me on Twitter, on my iPhone during a brief break of the PRI/BBC/Nova/Sigma Xi/WGBH/The World meeting. Thus, apart from a couple of quick retweets, I did not have the opportunity until now to take a better look and to say something about it.
You can see the news at the Seed site and download the official press release. And listening to the podcast about the awards AND opening the envelopes with winners's names is great fun.
Then, take some time to go through the list of all…