interview

I wish I knew how many times per week I get pitched opportunities to "interview" brave, unconventional, innovative "scientists" on my blog. Too many to count, most weeks. The pseudoscience PR whirlpool is vast and slippery. But there's also the legitimate "Hey, somebody at my university just published this thing, maybe you want to talk to them" pitch. While often interesting, that's not really what I do on this blog. I don't really do science explainers. But once in a while, a pitch resonates. And such is the case with the pitch I got from Guerilla Science a few weeks ago. I'd heard of them…

Ikonokast interviews Don Prothero. Don Prothero is the author of just over 30 books and a gazillion scientific papers covering a wide range of topics in paleontology and skepticism. Mike Haubrich and I spoke with Don about most of these topics, including the recent history of the skeptics movement, the conflict and potentials between DNA and fossil research, extinctions and impacts, evolution in general, and the interesting projects Don is working on now. The interview is here. Please click through and give this fascinating conversation a listen!

I did an interview with JD Goodwin at at Blue Streak Science. It is here. Great science podcast, check out their other items. Here is the interview on iTunes.

This was technically difficult owing to internet conditions but interviewer Vijay Kishore Vaidyanathan did a great job with what he had. In particular he did a great job editing out the constant explosions in the background! https://soundcloud.com/mobile-journalism-4/talk-with-prof-greg-laden

As you know, I do the occasional science-related interview on Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio, on Radio AM 950. (See this for a list of all, or at least most, of the work I've done with that show.) On Sunday October 5th at the ungodly hour of 9:00 AM Central Time, I'll be interviewing Michael Mann, and Mike Haubrich will host. There is plenty to talk about but if you have a specific topic you'd like to see covered, or a specific question, feel free to note it below in the comments section. It is also possible to call in or send an email to the station during the show. Listen to the show…

Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly defined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen. The series has been extremely irregular for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…

Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly defined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen. The series has been extremely irregular for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…

Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly defined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen. The series has been extremely irregular for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…

Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly definined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen. The series has been lying fairly fallow for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…

Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. This latest installment is with Mark Patterson, Executive Director of new OA publisher eLife. I attended an ARL Directors briefing conference call on eLife with Mark a little while back, highlighting for me just how interesting this project is and just how little I knew about it before the call. Hence, this interview. A huge thanks to Mark for agreeing to participate! =============   Q0. Mark, tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up…

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” -Joan of Arc Regardless of what intrinsic differences any person or group of people have from another, everyone deserves to be treated as an individual, afforded the same opportunities to pursue their passions, goals and dreams, and evaluated on the merits of their performance. Although this is not yet the way the world works, I am confident that many strides are consistently being made in the right direction, and I was…

I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview with Mike Morgan is from April 24, 2007. ===================================== It's time for another in my occasional series of scitech publishing/…

I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview, with Eugene Wallingford, is from July 9, 2008. I'm hoping to get these out weekly, but we'll see. They're mostly cobbled together in odd moments…

Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. The latest is with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ. PeerJ is a new startup in the scientific publishing industry, using a rather unique business model whereby authors will be able to pay one fee and they get a lifetime of publishing their articles in PeerJ. Please see my post with the PeerJ press release for more details. I recently had an opportunity to ask Peter and Jason some pre-announcement questions about PeerJ and I've included…

Last week, I wrote a piece for Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick's flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to Motherboard and mainline it for yourselves. For the piece, I interviewed the lead programmer on the first version of the PKD Android, Dr. Andrew Olney. Aside from bringing science fiction legends back from the dead, Olney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis and Associate Director of the same university's…

Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science. You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share. I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space. Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space…

Last May I heaved myself out of bed a little before 5am so I could undertake a mammoth 12 hour round trip to that pantheon of industrial decay, Rotherham. What did the home of Jive Bunny and the Chuckle Brothers have to entice me on such a journey? Why, only Science World 2011, Fisher Scientific's annual trade fair. And their keynote speaker for the day, the Baroness. No, not that Baroness. I'm talking about Professor Susan Greenfield, who has made something of a name for herself with her theories about the effects of the internet on the brain. Namely, that the pervasiveness of digital…

Engineering really matters. Did you know that all the major challenges facing the U.S. and the rest of the world - from medicine and homeland security to energy, food and water supply and communications - cannot be solved without engineering? In this revealing video clip, hear what Dr. Chuck Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has to say about what it will take for America to train enough engineers to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

Welcome to the long-awaited latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subjects of my first group interview are the gang at EngineerBlogs.org. From my welcome-to-the-blogosphere post, here's a condensed bit about them: Cherish The Scientist (EB) I am an electrical engineer with an interest in various areas of electromagnetics, including antennas and numerical simulation techniques, as well as IC packaging. I have completed a master's degree in electrical engineering and am currently pursuing a…