Blogging
retrospectacle | April 25, 2007Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math has a very supportive article up summarizing my tangle with lawyers yesterday over the 'fair use' of a figure from the fruit antioxidant paper.
In short, I was threatened with legal action if I didn't take it down immediately. I used a panel a figure, and a chart, from over 10+ figures in the paper. I cited and reported everything straight forwardly. I would think they'd be happy to get the press. But alas, no.
I got around them by complying, but reproducing the figures myself in Excel. They didn't bother me anymore, as apparently thats 100% legal and…
clock | April 24, 2007Blogs! A new world! Breaking new frontiers all the time!
A few days ago, PLoS ONE posted a few job ads, including this one. A friend of mine saw it and thought the job-description was pretty much a Bora-description (another friend wrote in an e-mail that all it is missing is a clause "must be a Red-State Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student"), so he sent me the link.
Some people like to keep secrets, but I like to air my thoughts in public (why have a blog otherwise?) so I posted my thoughts about it late on Friday night and decided to sleep on it, think about it over the weekend,…
clock | April 20, 2007It has 'Coturnix' written all over it, don't you think? I am even wearing my PLoS t-shirt right now as I am typing this!
But, why is it necessary to move to San Francisco? My wife is terrified of earthquakes and CA is one state she always said she would never move to.
Looking at the job description, everything can be easily done sitting in my pajamas here in Chapel Hill, or on a submarine, or on the Moon. It's all online:
PLoS ONE Online Community Manager
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit advocacy and publishing organization located in the China Basin area of San…
clock | April 19, 2007You may be aware that there is a huge discussion about framing science going on in the blogosphere. It has gotten out of hand. But, for those who want to dig in, or want to analyze the posts and comments (that is a lot of data!), here is the comprehensive list of links (excluded are links to Creationists' sites). Most of the posts also have long and interesting comment threads as well, worth reading through:
First, the source metarial, i.e., the stuff that appeared in non-blog media, and some background resources (which, if everyone have read them, would have reduced some of the…
retrospectacle | April 19, 2007Sorry, I accidentally published a post-in-progress which wasn't finished yet (on HIV, for those that were mystified about where the rest of it was). Got a couple confused comments, so sorry bout that.
Oops! You'll just have to wait until tomorrow to see the real thing. :)
But if you really want something to read tonight which might set your wheels a-turnin', check this out. Can't say I agree with it, but does make food-for-thought in light of recent events.
clock | April 19, 2007Science journalists and science communicators who attended the Knight New Media Center Best Practices: Covering Science in Cyberspace seminar in March 2007 collectively wrote a blog during the meeting:
Two dozen prominent science journalists and science communicators were invited to participate in this special conference with three goals: 1) Identify the critical issues facing science journalists in the digital age; 2) identify innovative forms of multimedia story-telling and presentation of complex issues online; and 3) identify "best practices" for coverage of science issues on digital…
clock | April 16, 2007Chapel Hill/Carrboro blogger meetup will be on Wednesday, April 18 at 6:30pm at Milltown Restaurant and Bar in Carrboro.
clock | April 16, 2007Pimm thinks that
scientists were out of the first inhabitants of the word wide web, and most academic web pages were made by scientist-turned web geeks in the 1.0 era.
He shows some examples of good webpages. I added the Reffinetti lab as an example of a good one.
How's yours? Last updated in 2004? On a corporate template?
If you have an example of a really good one, send the link to Pimm.
clock | April 9, 2007Go say Hello to Jennifer Jacquet and Randy Olson (aka 'Dodo') at Shifting Baselines
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2007This week I'm doing fieldwork in Östergötland with friends, colleagues and Aard regulars from the Gothenburg Historical Society, the County Museum and the State Excavation Unit. We're continuing our metal detecting campaign from last spring, returning to the sites in Kaga and Hagebyhöga, and having a look at four new ones in Heda, Varv, Askeby and Östra Husby. Our objective is to find aristocratic farmstead sites of the period AD 400-1000. Swedish State Broadcasting's science show for kids, Hjärnkontoret, will pay us a visit.
One thing I miss since moving to ScienceBlogs is the ability to…
voltagegate | April 6, 2007The nature of the comment thread is ultimately predictable. It's a like a Great Catharsis.
clock | April 5, 2007Remember "Ask the ScienceBlogger" series? Well, it's back. And it is somewhat different now. Instead of putting the question out for everyone to respond to (or not) at their own leisure, this time one particular SB blog will be charged with answering the question, and others are free to chime in if they wish so afterwards.
The first question is out of the box now:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
And Dave and Greta Munger of Cognitive Daily were charged with answering it. They did the…
clock | April 5, 20072007 TED Prize winner E.O. Wilson on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks:
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; and yet we're steadily, methodically, vigorously destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of…
clock | April 5, 2007I was waiting until the last installment was up to post about this. Revere on Effect Measure took a recent paper about a mathematical model of the spread of anti-viral resistance and wrote a 16-part series leading the readers through the entire paper, from the title to the List of References and everything in between. While the posts are unlikely to garner many comments, this series will remain online as a valuable resource, something one can use to learn - or teach others - how a scientific paper is to be analyzed.
As you can see, it takes a lot of time to read a paper thoroughly. It also…
clock | April 5, 2007Neural Gourmet and Blue Gal are organizing a massive blogospheric Blog Against Theocracy weekend:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism,…
clock | April 5, 2007Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media.
On the other hand, people in the humanities/literature/art/liberal arts side of campus have long ago embraced blogging as a tool to get their rough drafts out, to refine them upon receiving feedback from commenters, and subsequently publish them in peer-reviewed journals. If you follow History Carnival,…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2007My dear scibling and fellow big-nose European Bora, over at the one Sblog that comes before Aard in the alphabetical list, has "tagged me with a meme". That is, he has handed me a coat of chainmail. No, he's sent me a chain letter, with a blogging assignment. I usually don't bother about these things because a) I'm afraid to scare readers away, b) I don't find them very fun to write myself. But this time, the question is one that might actually be interesting to some people, and somebody posed it to me face-to-face recently. Why do I blog?
As a hint, let me first quote from The Jet's latest…
clock | April 4, 2007I got tagged with a meme by Greg who is trying to track the branching tree of this meme, so go check his post out (especially let him know if you do one of your own). He is also instructing us that the post is supposed to be full of links....
I love blog memes, and I have done many of them, most of which in one way or another reveal "why I blog": Academic Blog Meme, Beautiful Bird Meme, Random Quotes Meme, Silly Blog Meme, Four Meme, Hanukah meme, Zero Meme, Dirty Thirty Meme, Thinking Blogger Meme, States Meme, Obscure-But-Good-Movies Meme, Four Jobs Meme, The Blogging Blog Meme, Year in…
clock | April 4, 2007Are you, too?
Is there a good, dignified response we could invent to use in such situations?
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2007Seed has just revamped and re-launched the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" feature on the Sb front page . This time only one blogger answers each question. With a heavy dominance around here for bloggers in the life sciences, we're unlikely to see many questions that I'm equipped to answer with more than a silly joke or two. Unless you, Dear Reader, send them some rundkvisty questions! Here's the address: askablogger@seedmediagroup.com. Figure out questions that the Seed people may believe that a large number of readers would like to see answered -- then they might pick your suggestion.