blogosphere
bioephemera | April 8, 2008
S. Watson's American Museum of Living Curiosities
British Library, via Museum of Hoaxes
It will be my pleasure to host the April edition of the Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival created by Tim at Walking the Berkshires. According to Tim, here's what you're in for:
What I have in mind is show and tell for grown ups. As with the Wunderkammer of old, the curiosities in this virtual cabinet will include oddities and marvels of natural history, cryptozoology, archeology and ethnography, historical or religious relics, artifacts, mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera: in short, a…
scientificactivist | March 7, 2008ScienceBlogs is inviting each of its blogs to name two "Super Readers". These "Super Readers" will have access to a new del.icio.us account, where they'll be able to tag three ScienceBlogs posts of their choice per week. These will go on to a feed on the homepage, which I believe will replace the most active/most emailed feature currently in use.
So, who are my "Super Readers"?
Well, I have some ideas, but I don't know if you'll be interested. So, if you are interested, let me know by email or in the comments of this post. I'll pick my two "Super Readers" based on a combination of…
scientificactivist | March 3, 2008Last Thursday, the Royal Institution (in conjunction with Nature Network London) sponsored a panel on science blogging at the London Apple Store. The panel was a pretty good cross section of the science blogosphere, featuring three bloggers who have followed differing career paths and write quite different blogs. Ben Goldacre is a physician and journalist, and his blog Bad Science is devoted to taking down pseudoscience. Jennifer Rohn is a postdoc, and on her blog Mind the Gap she mostly writes about life as a scientist. And, finally, Ed Yong is an information officer for Cancer UK. On…
scientificactivist | February 24, 2008The Royal Institution, in conjunction with Nature Network, is sponsoring a program on science blogging this Thursday (28 February):
Blogging science
Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong
Thursday 28 February 2008
7.00pm-8.30pm
What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them.
There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round news or analysis,…
bioephemera | February 18, 2008Well, the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting here in Boston was fun! I didn't expect that. I'm not a huge fan of scientific conferences because I have an extremely short attention span. And I haven't been blogging a lot - I'd rather just enjoy the frenzy. I've been averaging 4.5 hours of sleep a night, to the dismay of my roomies! But Discover has been blogging regularly, as have some of the Sciblings.
Saturday's highlight should have been the appearance by representatives of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, who spoke on the candidates' scientific policy positions. Sheril already summarized (update:…
scientificactivist | February 11, 2008As the Holiday That Will Not Be Named approaches rapidly, I have a little request for my readers and the blogosphere at large. Two years ago, The Scientific Activist introduced the blogosphere to valinetines, scientifically-themed valentines named after the amino acid valine. Here's a classic example from my friend Josh Siepel:
You've wounded me, dear;
And how can it be?
You've reached in and disabled
My p53.
Something is growing,
You've heard the rumour
Love grows in my heart
And it isn't a tumor.
Get the picture? Good, now it's your turn to write your own valinetines. Get those…
scientificactivist | January 30, 2008Today John Edwards officially dropped out of the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. However inevitable this was, it was still sad to see it finally happen. Edwards fought a clean, issues-driven campaign, but it wasn't enough to compete against the wild but justified excitement of the prospect of a formative Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton presidency. It's unfortunate to see Edwards leave, but I'm sure many more good things from him are still to come.
The obvious question--one that remains to be answered--is who will his supporters turn to now? The two overriding themes…
scientificactivist | January 24, 2008Back in October of 2007, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3) was launched in order to (one day) aggregate blog posts about the scientific literature on one site and to provide a universal icon to identify posts on peer-reviewed literature. Now BPR3 version 2.0 is out, manifested as Research Blogging.org.
Go check out the new site to see what bloggers are saying about the literature. Or, better yet, register your blog, and have relevant posts feed directly onto the Research Blogging home page. In my own opinion, though, the coolest feature of the site is its citation…
scientificactivist | November 19, 2007Newsweek has a story online today about a passage, in a book published by Wiley, that was recently discovered to have been plagiarized (D'oh!) from Wikipedia. Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley of Retrospectacle gets a mention, though, for her run-in with Wiley earlier this year over her inclusion of a few figures from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in a blog post... a post that just so happened to be slightly critical of the article's press release. From Newsweek:
In an ironic wrinkle, this isn't Wiley's first embarrassing encounter with new media. In April, Shelley…
scientificactivist | November 3, 2007Thursday was the last day of the month-long DonorsChoose challenge, and ScienceBlogs did incredibly well. You can view the full leaderboard here, but Janet of Adventures in Ethics and Science offers these details:
20 Sb blogs mounted challenges; 12 of them met or exceeded their fundraising goals.
We raised:
$54,335 from Sb donors
$15,000 from Seed Media Group
(More than $69,000 total.)
155 classroom projects fully funded (although this will go up a lot when we spread the $15,000 from Seed Media Group around) and many partially funded.
That's fantastic, and, thanks to some very generous…
scientificactivist | October 29, 2007If so, you'll be interested in today's announcement from BPR3 (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting):
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.
Within a month, these blog posts will also be aggregated here, so everyone can go to one place to locate the most serious, thoughtful analysis and commentary on the web.
But we encourage you to start using the icons now. They'…
scientificactivist | October 14, 2007Tomorrow, 15 October, is the inaugural Blog Action Day. This means that thousands of bloggers from across the internet will publish posts on a single topic: the environment. So far over 14,000 blogs have signed up, with an estimated audience of over 12,000,000 readers. And, especially considering the outcome of the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday, the topic couldn't be more relevant.
Check out the official site for more details:
Hat tip to A Blog Around the Clock
scientificactivist | October 8, 2007We're one week into the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge, and we're already off to a great start. Thanks to some generous donations, we've already (as of the publishing of this post) raised $295 here at The Scientific Activist (30% of our $1,000 goal). Even more impressively, the participants at ScienceBlogs have together raised over $12,500. And, we still have over three weeks to go!
So, let me thank you all for your generosity, and, if you haven't donated yet, please take a look at the projects that need funding. Even a little bit goes a long way. One project that I'd particularly like…
scientificactivist | October 8, 2007Once again, fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is a finalist for the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship at CollegeScholarships.org. The winner is chosen by a popular vote, so if you think she's deserving, go vote for her here. I already did.
Here are the reasons Shelley laid out last year for why you should consider voting for her:
I'm a PhD student studying a cure for deafness. My thesis is related to the regeneration of the sensory cells in the inner ear, which people lose as they age, in response to noise, or are born without. Deafness and hearing loss is a very serious and…
scientificactivist | October 1, 2007It's that time of the year again, when us bloggers take a moment away from our posturing to actually do some good for this world. Yes, that's right: today DonorsChoose is kicking off its 2007 Bloggers Challenge. And, just like last year, several of us at ScienceBlogs have put together our own challenges to raise money for science classrooms.
Last year's challenge was such a success here at ScienceBlogs (raising $26,938.80 for science classrooms) that we're doing it again this year... for twice as long! The challenge starts today and will continue until the 31st of October. So, please,…
scientificactivist | October 1, 2007This announcement is related to another bigger one that's coming in just a few hours.
Six Apart (who runs MovableType, the blogging platform we use at ScienceBlogs) is giving away $30 philanthropic gift certificates for use on DonorsChoose. The only catch is that you have to contact Six Apart by noon today (Monday, October 1st)!
At DonorsChoose, teachers submit short proposals for classroom projects that need funding, giving potential donors a wide array of worthy causes to contribute to. Today is also the beginning of the 2007 DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge, but there will be more on that…
scientificactivist | September 22, 2007Political campaigning can be a cynical business, but this takes things to a whole new level. Check out this ad by Republican Timothy Hugo of the Virginia House of Delegates. The ad quotes "others" as saying that Democrat Rex Simmons ran "the most cowardly campaign I have ever seen.... Rex was spreading lies..... Rex has been lying to voters the entire campaign." But, that's not the shocking part.
In the ad, the only source given for this is "www.raisingkaine.com", the progressive political blog Raising Kaine. The issue, though, is that none of those comments ever appeared on www.…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
PZ asked his students these questions on an exam that he was recently writing;
14. Hey! Have you noticed the lack of women scientists so far? Briefly speculate about why they're missing.
15 (2 pts extra credit). Name a female scientist of any era.
So .. in addition to those questions, I pose these questions for you regarding female scientists;
Can you name any? Who?
Who is the first woman scientist who comes to mind?
Do you have a "favorite" woman scientist?
My answers to these additional questions are…
scientificactivist | September 21, 2007As ScienceBlogs approaches its 500,000th comment, The Scientific Activist just passed a milestone of its own: its 1,000th comment since joining ScienceBlogs. In the spirit of the occasion, then, I'd like to thank everyone who has commented on the blog--whether regularly or just once--but special props go to Dr. SLC, who graced us with comment 1,000 in a discussion on HIV/AIDS in South Africa that has... well... taken on a life of its own.
So, for those who have not commented yet, give it a try. It'll feel good. Trust me. (Plus, there are prizes!)
And, without further ado, here's to the…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
Image: Anemi
I have been thinking more about TheScientist's recent online article, "Vote for your favorite life science blogs", where they asked this same question of seven of the "top" life science bloggers -- all of whom just so happened to be men. It reminded me of Declan Butler's Nature article that was published approximately two years ago, where he listed the "top" science blogs using some rather ambiguous standards that were inconsistently applied for defining precisely what is a science blog ..…