Blogging
jstemwedel | March 11, 2010Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it.
Almost two months later, I'm ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised.
My space, your space, our space.
To my mind, civil engagement is only an issue if you are engaging with other people. If you are conducting a soliloquy, rather than a colloquy, it's hard to imagine where you'd run into…
clock | March 9, 2010The Online News Association organizes a meeting every year (and gives Online Journalism Awards there). The next one will be in October 28-30, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
The program is formed by the online news community submitting proposals, then everyone else voting the proposals up or down. I guess that the organizers also have some say in it (especially if the voting produces a horrible gender imbalance - easy to happen with so many proposals put forward by men).
The proposals are now all up online and ready for your votes - you need to register (they have to avoid spammers, robots,…
clock | March 8, 2010Go say Hello to Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski, the newest bloggers on the Scienceblogs.com network at Obesity Panacea.
They cover health, physiology, nutrition and exercise - something we did not have here on the network before, at least not in such a concentrated form. Check out the archives of their old blog and then bookmark the new Obesity Panacea.
laelaps | March 8, 2010
Long-time readers of this blog know that "Laelaps" is not so much a stand-alone repository of my thoughts and opinions as an active writing lab; from the very beginning I have had bigger things in mind. One of those projects, my book Written in Stone, will be published later this year, and every now and then I have thrown together a few thoughts on what it is like to write a pop-sci book. I am hardly the only science blogger to have gone through this process, though, and starting next week I will be teaming up with two other geoscience writers in an effort to help potential book authors…
clock | March 8, 2010As you may know, I love the Journal of Science Communication. It publishes some very interesting and useful scholarly articles on a wide array of issues pertaining to the communication, education and publishing of science. I wish more science bloggers (and non-blogging scientists) read it and blogged about their articles. Unfortunately, human nature being as it is, most of the excellent papers go by un-noticed by the blogosphere, while an occasional sub-standard paper gets some play - it is so much easier to critique than to analyze or even praise.
One such paper is now making the rounds - it…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
emjohnson | March 4, 2010Bonobos and the Child-Like Joy of Sharing
Haiti and the Loan That Wasn't
Can You Solve This Nearly 300-Year-Old Medical Mystery
Teaching Evolutionary History
An Academic Love Story
emjohnson | March 3, 2010Think you know Nature Network? Wait till you see what they're up to now. The members of my former parish have now unveiled their long awaited MT4 platform and you can re-experience all of their wonderful science blogginess updated afresh for your viewing pleasure.
The administrators announced the news yesterday at Schemes and Memes:
Nature Network turned three last month. During our early years, we've enjoyed thousands of illuminating, entertaining and sometimes controversial posts from our diverse pool of bloggers. Now, exciting new changes are afoot.
From tomorrow, Nature Network's blogs…
clock | March 2, 2010You may be aware that, as of recently, one of my tasks at work is to monitor media coverage of PLoS ONE articles. This is necessary for our own archives and monthly/annual reports, but also so I could highlight some of the best media coverage on the everyONE blog for everyone to see. As PLoS ONE publishes a large number of articles every week, we presume that many of you would appreciate getting your attention drawn to that subset of articles that the media found most interesting.
So, for example, as I missed last week due to my trip to AAAS, I posted a two-week summary of media coverage this…
neurophilosophy | March 1, 2010
I 'M pleased to announce that my post about dinosaur brains and behaviour is featured in Open Lab 2009, the annual anthology of the best science writing on blogs. The book has just been published and is now available at Lulu.com, in hard copy or as a Kindle-compatible PDF.
This is the third Neurophilosophy post to be published in this series of books: my posts about the discovery of the neuron and the history of trepanation were included in the 2006 and 2007 editions, respectively.
This blog has also been selected as a finalist in the first annual Research Blogging Awards. I thought it might…
clock | February 27, 2010A couple of weeks ago, there was a flurry of tweets, tagged with #sci140 hashtag on Twitter. What was that about? People were trying to summarize scientific papers in 140 characters or less. Actually, they had to use less as the hashtag itself took some space.
Almost 200 tweets were made, and they have all been collected (and the winners chosen) in this blog post on f1000 blog.
I found the exercise fascinating!
First, it was quite incredible how many more people chose to tweet well-known classical papers compared to those tweeting their own (thus obscure) publications. I would not call it…
emjohnson | February 27, 2010The finalists have been chosen in the first annual Research Blogging Awards for material written about peer-reviewed literature. Some of my favorite bloggers have been selected including Neurophilosophy, Laelaps, Not Exactly Rocket Science, A Blog Around the Clock (BoraZ also has the best Twitterer category locked in), Skulls in the Stars, Observations of a Nerd, Mauka to Makai, The Scientific Activist, and A Primate of Modern Aspect.
The Primate Diaries has also been selected in the categories of Research Blog of the Year and Blog Post of the year for my piece: "Does Taking Birth Control…
clock | February 26, 2010Chris Brodie is teaching the 'Explaining Science to the Public' class at NC State University. His students come from English, science and engineering departments and he is teaching them how to write well and how to utilize all of the modern technologies for science communication.
The students are now all on Twitter - yup, that's a class assignment - and you can follow their discussions if you search for the #esttp hashtag.
I visited their class last month and discussed various new forms of online science communication with them. Almost all of them also came to hear a wonderful presentation…
laelaps | February 26, 2010Today is my 27th birthday. To celebrate Tracey and I were planning on visiting Philadelphia's Mutter Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but given the deep accumulation of snow we thought better of going into the city. I can still celebrate by sharing something with you, though. Presented below is the cover of my forthcoming book Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature.
And, in related news, I am dusting off the old "Best of Laelaps" anthology project. It is tentatively-titled Giant Killer Lungfish From Hell and Other Tales From Deep Time, and it will…
clock | February 25, 2010A stellar line-up of judges has finished their work and announced the finalists of the 2010 Research Blogging Awards. This was a huge job - just look at the entire list of nominees!!! What a fantastic list of the best of the best of science blogs and their best posts, in several languages.
You can see who made it to the finals by clicking here and start exploring blogs you did not know before. I guarantee you will find new candidates for your blogrolls and subscriptions.
Voting for the winners will be on March 4th and the winners of the awards will be announced on March 23rd.
I did make it…
clock | February 24, 2010If you are interested in the topic of science journalism, how it's changing, what's new, and who's who in it, you are probably already reading Knight Science Journalism Tracker. If not, you should start now.
They have recently been digging around and finding projects with which I am involved in one way or another. For example, a few days ago, they profiled science blogs in general and scienceblogs.com in particular, but mainly focused on ResearchBlogging.org which aggregates and gives a stamp of approval to blog posts covering peer-reviewed research. The aggregator is a local thing - it is a…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2010The eighty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Ciarán at Ad hominin. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 28 April. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2010
The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!
clock | February 23, 2010Yes, the day has finally arrived! The anthology is now up for sale!
Just go ahead right now and click on this link right here, then click on the "Add To Cart" button and one copy (or more!) of this amazing book will be yours!
SciCurious did a fantastic job as this year's editor - and it shows. You'll see when you get your copy. Really.
Also, huge props to Blake and his LaTeX and generally tech-savviness for putting the book together so it looks really good (and is actually loaded on the site!).
Cover art was done by Glendon Mellow who used the cover design by Dave Ng.
The list of judges is so…