Blogging
clock | March 23, 2010Wow! I often get the vibes and hints in the background and through the grapevine when the Borg is about to swallow yet another unsuspecting science blogger. But this took me totally by surprise! And it could not have happened to a worthier blogger. Go say Hello to Christie Wilcox who just moved her delicious blog Observations Of A Nerd from here to its new digs here. Welcome to the Family! (you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave....)
emjohnson | March 23, 2010It has just been announced that my fellow Scibling Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science has been voted the winner of the 2010 Research Blogging Awards. In addition to being voted as Best Blog of the Year he has additionally been selected for having the Best Lay-Level Blog and for having written the Best Post of the Year (for duck sex). He deserves our praise and admiration for the incredible and tireless work he's been doing for many years to communicate science in an informative and entertaining way. I'm thrilled to have been nominated in the same category as him and I encourage everyone…
clock | March 23, 2010This is the first time ever that I cared about SXSW conference or was jealous for not being there. Watching the blogs and Twitter stream, it appears to have been better and more exciting than ever. I guess I'll have to figure out a way to finally get myself there next year....
But this post is not really about SXSW. It is about presenting at such conferences. More specifically, how the back-channel (on Twitter and elsewhere) affects the way one needs to approach an invitation to speak at meetings where much of the audience is highly wired online: to say Yes or No to the invitation in the…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2010I haven't been able to live-blog from the road since I got rid of the Qtek two years ago. But now I'm trying out my new Samsung Galaxy Spica, and it seems to work!
awild | March 22, 2010The Nature Blog Network is the web's largest congregation of natural history enthusiasts and one of the finest places to find new bloggy reading. This week NBN interviews me as part of their Featured Blog series:
Whatâs the best thing about blogging?
Blogging is instantaneous. I can respond to new scientific papers as I read them, for example. This might not sound like much, but you have to understand the traditional scientific publishing model. In the old system if I wanted to react to a paper, Iâd submit a letter or a review to the journal, itâd go through peer-review, and 8 months…
clock | March 22, 2010My SciBling Rebecca Skloot will be here in the Triangle for a couple of days this week promoting her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I'll be out of town for most of this (off to Boston in a couple of hours), but you should come to one or more of these events if you can:
Monday night 3/22, 7:30 pm she'll be at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh just off the Wade Ave exit on I-40:
Tuesday 3/23, noon, she'll be Frank Stasio's guest on The State of Things at WUNC-FM 91.5
Tuesday 3/23, 3 pm, she'll be the keynote speaker of a mini-symposium on African American issues in science, medicine, and…
clock | March 22, 2010The 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…
laelaps | March 19, 2010
Earlier this week David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Sand), and I started a blog series about the details of publishing a popular science book (Parts 1, 2, and 3), but I have been a bit underwhelmed by the response. I had been hoping for some input from other published authors, questions or comments from aspiring book writers, and for the series to take the form of a conversation. Instead I feel like I am talking to myself. Is there anything anyone would like to know about the process of writing a pop-sci book? Or would you all prefer that I just get back to the science…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2010The eighty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Greg Laden. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 12 May. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
jstemwedel | March 18, 2010Our online world is searchable, but it seems likely than not all of our searches are destined to be fruitful.
Here are some searches that have recently brought people to this blog:
what temperature does mucus melt at
Do I smell a science fair project? (Or am I too stuffed up?)
* * * * *
tenure neuroscience dossier online
I am hopeful that the searcher in this case was looking for an exemplar. It would, of course, be a horrible idea to "find" one's tenure dossier online in the same way that some students seem to "find" research papers online.
* * * * *
passenger breast feeds a monkey
I…
jdupuis | March 18, 2010I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group.
That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
clock | March 18, 2010First, I would like to welcome Gozde Zorlu to the blogosphere - check out her blog and say Hello. Gozde is a science journalism student with Connie St.Louis (the same class as Christine Ottery who many of you met at ScienceOnline2010).
Gozde is interested in many aspects of science communication and journalism and more:
Here, I'll be catapulting into the big world wide web my exploration of the social, cultural and political implications of research in science, medicine and the environment. Also, I'll be blogging about issues to do with science in the media, science education and policy.
In…
emjohnson | March 17, 2010
The monthly anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth has just been posted. Ciarán was kind enough to include two of my recent posts and there is a wealth of information for those interested in all aspects of anthropology.
clock | March 17, 2010Remember the dissection of the "science blogging" study from a couple of weeks ago? There is now additional commentary by Janet, Dr.Isis, Bluegrass Blue Crab and Janet again and all the posts provoked some good comment threads as well. Check them out.
jstemwedel | March 16, 2010There's a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I'm not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and "get meta" with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns…
omnibrain | March 16, 2010In an amazing turn of events the most famous video of all time not on youtube is now on youtube... omg! omg! haha...
Follow the instructions if you actually haven't seen this before (which I would be surprised if you have not).
oh and look... Dan and Chris have a blog!
emjohnson | March 16, 2010My essay The Unseen and Unknowable Has No Place in Science has just gone up this morning in the Religion section of The Huffington Post:
Yes, religion is incompatible with science. This doesn't mean, of course, that religious people are incapable of doing science. Far from it. There are certain questions that don't probe too deeply into the foundations of a person's faith and they have no problem employing their reason to its fullest in those cases. But when reason starts to get uncomfortably close (as it has for Francis Collins, Deepak Chopra and Michael Behe) well, that's when the…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific Fields?…
emjohnson | March 15, 2010The latest edition of Scientia Pro Publica has been divided between eight blog posts based on theme. True to form, a single edition has influenced multiple posts in the blogospheric version of pleiotropy.
Beginning | Biology | Conservation | Ethics | Medicine | Physics | Psychology | Conclusion
This edition is massive with contributors from the following blogs providing the best science writing on the net:
A DC Birding Blog Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog Bioblog: Biology in the News Code for Life Deep Sea News Deep Thoughts and Silliness (a Nature Network alum w00t!) EcoTone EnviroBuzz…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2010The 88th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Ad Hominin on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ciarán, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 12 May. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.