Blogospheric science
jstemwedel | November 6, 2007If you're a TV watcher in the U.S., you're probably already aware that the Writers' Guild of America is on strike, owing largely to inability to reach agreement with the studios about residuals from DVDs and from internet distribution of TV shows and movies.
While I am a member of a faculty union that was on the verge of a strike last spring, I am not now nor have I ever been a writer for the large or small screen. I don't have a lot to say about the details of the contract negotiation in this particular case (Lindsay does). But, as Chris points out, as a blogger -- indeed, a blogger who…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007At the upcoming North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008, I'll be leading a discussion on the ethics of science blogging (not about blogging about ethics in science). If you attend the conference (and if you're not sucked in by one of the other attractive discussions scheduled for the same time-slot), you'll be able to take part in the conversation in real time.
But even if you won't be able to come to North Carolina for the conference, you can help set the agenda for our discussion by editing the wiki page for the session.
Here's what I've posted to get things going:…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair wants me to play along before I head to the airport. Here are the rules:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.
To make it easier…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2007I'm blogging from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This morning, I was part of a session (along with Bora Zivkovic and Jean-Claude Bradley) entitled "Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication". I thought I'd make a few brief comments about the session while my impressions are still fresh, but I reserve the right to say more later.
First off, for an 8:30 AM session, I was pretty impressed with the turnout. There were probably about 55 people in the…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2007We're in day 2 of the ScienceBlogs Blogger Challenge, during which we're working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for classroom projects. The amount contributed by ScienceBlogs readers is creeping up on $4000, which is pretty impressive.
But it looks like the real competition may be for which blogger can offer readers the best incentive to donate.
I thought I was doing pretty well with my offer of poetry, sprog artwork, or a basic concepts post written to order. (Indeed, we're already on the hook for an illustrated poem.) But my SciBlings have upped the ante:
Deep Sea News is…
jstemwedel | September 26, 2007Sean, Chad, and Steinn ponder the lameness of academics in self-reporting their "guilty pleasures".
Quoth Sean:
I immediately felt bad that I couldn't come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.
But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I'm some sort of…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2007Tara notices that social networking site Facebook has decided, in the enforcement of their policy against "nudity, drug use, or other obscene content", that pictures of breastfeeding babies are obscene. As such, the Facebook obscenity squad had been removing them -- and has deleted the account of at least one mom who had posted such pictures.
Break out the Ouija board and get late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously claimed that he couldn't define obscenity, but he knew it when he saw it. As far as the legal definition goes, "obscene" seems to be roughly equivalent to "…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2007
It has seemed to me for some time now that the landscape of news and information sources has changed since the end of the last century. Anecdotally, I seem to know an awful lot of people who rely primarily on online sources (both online versions of traditional newspapers and magazines and blogs with journalistic leanings that provide solidly researched articles and deep analysis) for their news. But I also seem to know some people who automatically equate information on the internet with the nutty website of a paranoid guy in the cellar.
And it's really hard to assume that the people I…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.
Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here.
Mark writes:
It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before.
And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007Actually, my memories of the semi-spontaneous confluence of ScienceBlogs sciblings in the vicinity of the Seed mothership this past weekend are quite vivid, and I'll put up a proper post on that later today.
But in the event that I hadn't remembered things so clearly, and had to piece it all together from what came home on my digital camera, my reflections on the last few day might be distorted.
I might end up with something like this:
Rob: You know what this place needs?
Chad: More physical science bloggers?
Rob: Mmm-hmm. There're lots of biologists, but they're small enough that I think…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2007Currently on Wikipedia, there's a stub that's trying to become an entry about ScienceBlogs.
And I can't help noticing that you're reading a ScienceBlogs blog. (Nice shirt, by the way -- it really suits you!)
So possibly you have some idea of what kind of information might be useful to the person turning to Wikipedia to try to understand what this whole ScienceBlogs thing is. If you do, please hie yourself to the discussion from which the entry will be built and discuss.
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007I've been getting word (via carrier pigeon, mostly) that some of your favorite ScienceBloggers are just itching to provide you with fabulous new posts. However, a series of massive power outages in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon seem to have given the interwebs some hiccups.
When the series of tubes is properly connected, they'll be back. Thanks for your patience.
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007Almost a year ago, I learned about the case of the Tripoli six, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician in Libya sentenced to death for infecting hundreds of children with HIV despite the fact that the best scientific evidence indicated that the children were infected due to negligence in the hospital well before these health care workers even arrived in Libya.
I asked you to write letters on behalf of the Tripoli six, in the hopes that they might get another trial in which the scientific evidence mattered to the verdict. Good people that you are, I know that lots of you did write…
jstemwedel | July 20, 2007Since Sandra has posted links to sites with brainy games for kids*, and Karmen is working on her list of science education web sites for children, I thought I'd mention one of my favorite online destinations for kid-strength chemistry. Luddite that I am, what I like best is that the site isn't hypnotizing your child with a virtual chemistry experiment, but actually gives you activities to do with the child in the three-dimensional world.
The site is chemistry.org/kids, a portal of the American Chemical Society website aimed specifically at kids, parents, and teachers.
For summer (here in…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2007Apparently Blake Stacey is pitching a movie about the Dover trial and featuring, as central characters, some luminaries from ScienceBlogs. There's sort of a Star Trek: The Original Series meets Star Trek: The Next Generation meets other iconic exemplars of science fiction and action genres vibe in the plot outline and casting ideas. At least, so far.
Me, I figured a ScienceBlogs movie might run more along the lines of All the President's Men meets This is Spinal Tap. Although there would definitely be stuff blowing up.
On the off chance that a studio exec is reading, this is your chance…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007The June 25th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has two pieces that talk about ways people are using features of the "new internet" (or Web 2.0) to disseminate and explore chemistry online.
Celia Henry Arnaud's article "A New Science Channel" looks at efforts scientists and scientific organizations have made to harness YouTube as a tool of outreach. Organizations like the Museum of Science, Boston and AAAS have taken videos created for museum kiosks and meetings and posted them on YouTube in the hopes that they "go viral" and reach a broader audience. (As AAAS discovered, this can be…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM -- at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she's about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) "long-winded, but in a good way," she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007If you had to give this blog a movie rating, what would it be and why?
Apparently, I earned that rating due to the occurrence of the word "death" and the B-word.
I'd have guessed that the "adult themes" (of bad actors in academic and scientific communities) would be more of a worry as far as what kiddies should be exposed to, but hey, I don't rate movies, I just watch 'em.
jstemwedel | June 15, 2007As you might guess, my site is one of the sources of content. If you're reading this post at New York Articles (or at "Articles", whose tagline is even more grammatically incorrect) rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience.
I'm not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count the pennies that come in to the leech that grabs the RSS and sells the Google Ads.*
Does such a site do anything to improve an already crowded blogosphere? Does anyone treat a sloppy feed aggregating site of this sort as a…
jstemwedel | June 14, 2007To address an issue that came up in discussion of posts on other blogs, I want to make clear the principles I follow when dealing with real-world scenarios here or via email:
My overarching goal is to foster reflection and dialogue among people (particularly scientists) working out how to behave ethically.
Talking about different scenarios can provide good material to sharpen our ethical intuitions and to try to formulate courses of action that are both ethical and do-able (from the point of view, say, of not wrecking one's career).
I don't believe that scenarios lose their usefulness if…