Blogospheric science
jstemwedel | October 22, 2008I've talked about a number of these issues before, but since Abel and PalMD are having some conversations (here, here, here, here, here, and here) in preparation for their session at ScienceOnline09, and since I've experienced the blogosphere on both sides of the pseudonymous line, I thought I'd pipe up.
Some good reasons (from the top of my head) to blog under a pseudonym:
Your workplace frowns on blogging (even if you are not blogging about work at all) and you want to stay employed.
You are a student whose advisor will equate your blogging with time not spent doing research (even though…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2008I suspect I'm late to the party on this one, but I just had occasion to check out The Periodic Table of Videos produced at the University of Nottingham. It's a collection of 118 short videos (ranging in length from approximately one to ten minutes each), one for each of the elements currently in the Periodic Table of the Elements.
I did not watch all 118 of them, but the ones that I did watch covered, among other things:
What mercury has to do with doorbells.
What molybdenum has to do with beans.
What sulfur has to do with Silly Putty.
What lead has to do with submarines.
What fluorine *…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2008As promised, we had a party on Friday night.
Some highlights:
The venue, Tonic, is a lovely bar, very clean, full of comfy seating and open space, and adorned with three flatscreen TVs to add visual interest. Seeing as how this is now a Bleiman bar, the screens were utilized to show Blue Planet. After the eerily beautiful sea creatures, the next movie in the background was Gidget. Sadly, Gidget did not do battle with a giant squid.
But the point of the party wasn't video viewing, nor expertly muddled mojitos. It was hanging out in the three dimensional world, which we did.
I got to…
jstemwedel | September 25, 2008Just a quick reminder that the San Francisco party to celebrate one million comments on ScienceBlogs is tomorrow, Friday, September 26, starting at 9:00 PM at Tonic, 2360 Polk Street (at the corner of Union). I'll be there, as will the brothers Bleiman, Craig McClain, Josh Rosenau, and Razib. If you show up, you'll be there, too!
Also, don't forget that until the end of September you can still enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City, including a dinner with your favorite ScienceBlogger.
jstemwedel | September 9, 2008If you make your way to this blog by way of the ScienceBlogs homepage, you may have noticed the "Comments" ticker clicking ever closer to 1,000,000. Our benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group have decided that crossing the millionth comment mark is cause for celebration, and they would like to offer you ScienceBlogs readers (whether you comment or merely lurk) a piece of the action.
First, you can enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City:
One lucky reader will win an all-out science adventure -- a trip for two to New York City and exclusive science adventures only…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2008On April Fool's Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences -- at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those "in the know" will recognize what's funny, and that those who don't see the humor are failing to find the funny because they're not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person…
jstemwedel | April 17, 2008Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, can we talk about pseudonymous blogging?
Dr. Free-Ride: Haven't you already written a bunch of posts about that?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Yeah, but the blogosphere seems to be discussing it again.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know I only work on Fridays, right?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Get your pseudonymous butt in gear and help me have a proper dialogue!
Dr. Free-Ride: Dude, how are we supposed to have a dialogue about this? I'm you. You have yourself a monologue.
Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, you were a pseudonymous blogger for a whole year! That's experience you can draw on.
Dr. Free-…
jstemwedel | March 31, 2008It's time to unplug from the ScienceBorg.
I've had enough of the oppressive editorial control, constraining my voice as a blogger. That "voice of reason" script I'm known for was assigned to me by our editors. And it's the same story for the personae of other Sb bloggers. PZ Myers as fire-breathing atheist, Zuska as puke-spewing feminist, Nisbet as aloof communications professor, revere(s) as leftist(s), Wilkins as agnostic, Lynch as Irish -- all scripted. We might as well be The Monkees for all the authenticity we display here. Heck, Razib doesn't even have a cat.
I am bone-tired of the…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2008Since Alice and Sciencewoman and DrugMonkey and Razib are discussing it (and because Zuska has discussed it before, including in real life), I wanted to say something about my reaction to the observation that science blogosphere in general, and ScienceBlogs in particular, seems pretty white:
I'd noticed that, too! And I'd like it a lot if there were more racial diversity among the science bloggers and the blogging scientists.
There would be some clear benefits to achieving more diversity -- but there might also be costs, and looking at who would bear those costs seems pretty important.
To…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2008All the cool kids were doing this particular round of navel-gazing yesterday and the day before, while I was either dreadfully ill and out of commission or somewhat better and working. (Today was also quite full of work stuff.) However, it's not an unimportant set of questions, and possibly you're curious about the answers, so let's give it a go:
1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog?
You know, initially I'm not sure I would have claimed that designation. This started as a blog about what's involved in being a responsible scientist -- so to that extent, the activity of science…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2008You may have been following the saga of intelligent design proponent Casey Luskin's use of the ResearchBlogging.org "Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research" icon in a way that didn't conform to the official guidelines for its use.
The short description on ResearchBlogging's mission says:
Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use our icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected here for easy reference.
The guidelines for using the spiffy icon include registering with…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2008By way of Abel and DrugMonkey (among others), I see that today is Blogroll Amnesty Day. Jon Swift has the must-read post on the origins of the day and what it means now:
The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008One of the things that came out of the discussion of the ethics of blogging about science at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference was a clear sense that we don't yet have general agreement about what kinds of ethics should guide science blogging -- in part, because we haven't come to an agreement about just what kind of activity science blogging is.
Is science blogging more like journalism or the scholarly activities of scientists reporting their findings to their peers? Is it education or punditry? Is it a profession or a hobby?
Different bloggers (and different blog readers) seem to…
jstemwedel | December 19, 2007In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2007When I partook of this last year, I thought it was a one time thing. But by golly, John Lynch seems to have established this meme as an annual tradition, and I kind of like traditions.
The rule: post the first sentence of the first post for each month.
January: Don't update your blog for a few days.
February: I simply cannot accept the final judgment in Bravo's Top Chef (season 2).
March: The inaugural edition of Scientiae, the new women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics blog carnival, has been posted at Rants of a Feminist Engineer.
April: In case you somehow missed…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2007Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn't really officially tagged -- Julie was, but she's busy writing papers and stuff, so I'm helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)
No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
The rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2007The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…
jstemwedel | November 14, 2007Over at The World's Fair, David Ng dangles another meme before us:
... this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Since it is well known that I am a tremendous Luddite, it will come as no surprise that my scientific eponym is a measure of how tremendous a…
jstemwedel | November 8, 2007... despite the fact that I'm deeply suspicious of claims that getting the most votes is truly indicative of being the best.
Anyhow, the category in which your vote might make a real difference (here at the last minute) is Best Science Blog:
I'm a big fan of In the Pipeline, Bootstrap Analysis and Invasive Species Weblog (and I hear that "Pharyngula" guy is a good read), in terms of the maximization of quality and "electability", I urge you to vote for Bad Astronomy.
Cast your vote now, before it's too late!