Blogging
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2010Archaeology Magazine's May/June issue (63:3) has a good long feature by Jarrett A. Lobell & Samir S. Patel on North European bog bodies including some new finds: Lower Saxony in 2000, the Hebrides in 2001 (you may have heard about the weird re-interred bog bodies found under a Bronze Age house) and Ireland in 2003. One of the bogged-down Irishmen was found with a bit of metalwork, which is to my knowledge unique.
The piece that really caught my interest though was Eric A. Powell's critical appraisal of a recent speculative History Channel program on the 19th century fake rune-stone from…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2010The ninety-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Raymond at The Prancing Papio. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is already on 9 June. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
awild | May 14, 2010
Heterospilus, undescribed species, Costa Rica
My more astute readers may have noticed that Myrmecos Blog has been uncharacteristically quiet this week. I do apologize, but I have a regular research job aside from blogging that periodically requires attention.
I've been assembling genetic and morphological data from 100 or so wasps in the hyperdiverse genus Heterospilus. These are small insects, typically under a centimenter in length, that attack stem-boring grubs like beetle and moth larvae. This week I am patching up the holes in the molecular data matrix, and this requires bench time…
clock | May 12, 2010Those of you who were reading scienceblogs.com two or three or four years ago may remember a feature we had here called "Ask a ScienceBlogger", in which a question, chosen by the Overlords out of thousands of your suggestions, is posed to all of us here on the network and several of us who wanted to participate in answering that particular question would post our answers almost simultaneously, on the same day, each post sporting the same icon and each post being mildly edited by our Overlords (usually just checking spelling and such).
You can see the archives of these posts here. They were…
clock | May 11, 2010It is somewhat hard to grok how much a Big Deal the WWW2010 conference is when it's happening in one's own backyard. After all, all I had to do was drop the kids at school a little earlier each morning and drive down to Raleigh, through the familiar downtown streets, park in a familiar parking lot, and enter a familiar convention center, just to immediately bump into familiar people - the 'home team' of people I have been seeing at blogger meetups, tweetups and other events for years, like Paul Jones, Ruby Sinreich, Fred Stutzman, Ryan Boyles, Wayne Sutton, Kim Ashley, Henry Copeland and…
clock | May 10, 2010Go say Hello to Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science.
Check out her old blog and website, follow her on Twitter and enjoy her latest book - The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.
clock | May 10, 2010Last week I attended the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh. I posted my summary of the event over on Science In The Triangle blog so check it out.
clock | May 9, 2010One difference between reading Open Laboratory anthologies and reading the original posts included in them is that the printed versions are slightly edited and polished. Another difference is that the Prefaces and Introductions can be found only in the books. They have never been placed online.
But now that four books are out and we are halfway through collecting entries for the fifth one, when only the 2009 book is still selling, I think it is perfectly OK to place Prefaces and Introductions that I wrote myself online. I wrote Prefaces for the 2006, 2007 and 2008 book, as well as the…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2010The 92nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Sam, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already 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.
awild | May 9, 2010
Dandelion through the eyes of a macro-adapted iPhone 3G
Nothing warms the heart of a blogger more than birthing a meme. A couple weeks ago I posted a short article on how a hand lens can enable a cell phone to do macrophotography. Other bloggers have taken to the idea and have been posting their results. Here are some of them:
Microecos
Highly Allochthonous
Mountain Beltway
Looking for Detachment
laelaps | May 8, 2010
Written in Stone is now available for pre-sale on Amazon.com (as well as a few other online stores)! The description of the book, author bio, etc. will have to be updated, but otherwise it is good to see it get its own page, and many thanks to the several of you who have already pre-ordered copies.Yet another cool new paleo blog - Crurotarsi: The Forgotten Archosaurs. Looks like I am going to have to update my blogroll again.In the "online first" section of Evolution: Education and Outreach there is a new paper on science communication (which also covers the Darwinius kerfuffle) by Carl…
clock | May 7, 2010Last week, at the SigmaXi pizza lunch (well, really dinner), organized by SCONC, we were served a delicious dish - a lively presentation by Dennis Meredith about Explaining Research, the topic of his excellent new book - in my humble opinion the best recent book on this topic.
His presentation was almost identical to what he presented on our panel at the AAAS meeting in February in San Diego, and you can check out the slideshow (with the audio of his presentation going on with the slides) here.
Dennis and I are friends, and he attended 3-4 of the four ScienceOnline conferences to date and you…
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of ILIt's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni Olshen…
clock | April 30, 2010James Hrynyshyn has renamed and moved his blog, Island Of Doubt to a new place, still here on scienceblogs.com, Class: M. Adjust your bookmarks and subscriptions.
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2010The ninety-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sexy Archaeology. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! And keep those hands where I can see them, OK?
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Sam at Sorting Out Science. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 9 June. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
clock | April 29, 2010Introducing Beaker, inspired by our panel at AAAS a couple of months ago. Go take a look.
awild | April 29, 2010Blog posts are long, thin things.
One could, for example, use a blog to post a high-resolution map of Chile. Or a single strand of spagetti. Any image up to 500 pixels wide, for as long as it goes. In that vein, here's a Cephalotes varians turtle ant:
Just wait until I find a stick insect.
jstemwedel | April 28, 2010Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
For one thing, it can give you a glimpse of the lives of people who are working out how how to become grown-up scientists, or how to combine a scientific career with a life outside of that career. The wide array of scientists at different career stages working out…