science reporting
clock | March 9, 2010The Online News Association organizes a meeting every year (and gives Online Journalism Awards there). The next one will be in October 28-30, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
The program is formed by the online news community submitting proposals, then everyone else voting the proposals up or down. I guess that the organizers also have some say in it (especially if the voting produces a horrible gender imbalance - easy to happen with so many proposals put forward by men).
The proposals are now all up online and ready for your votes - you need to register (they have to avoid spammers, robots,…
clock | March 2, 2010You may be aware that, as of recently, one of my tasks at work is to monitor media coverage of PLoS ONE articles. This is necessary for our own archives and monthly/annual reports, but also so I could highlight some of the best media coverage on the everyONE blog for everyone to see. As PLoS ONE publishes a large number of articles every week, we presume that many of you would appreciate getting your attention drawn to that subset of articles that the media found most interesting.
So, for example, as I missed last week due to my trip to AAAS, I posted a two-week summary of media coverage this…
clock | February 27, 2010A couple of weeks ago, there was a flurry of tweets, tagged with #sci140 hashtag on Twitter. What was that about? People were trying to summarize scientific papers in 140 characters or less. Actually, they had to use less as the hashtag itself took some space.
Almost 200 tweets were made, and they have all been collected (and the winners chosen) in this blog post on f1000 blog.
I found the exercise fascinating!
First, it was quite incredible how many more people chose to tweet well-known classical papers compared to those tweeting their own (thus obscure) publications. I would not call it…
clock | February 26, 2010Chris Brodie is teaching the 'Explaining Science to the Public' class at NC State University. His students come from English, science and engineering departments and he is teaching them how to write well and how to utilize all of the modern technologies for science communication.
The students are now all on Twitter - yup, that's a class assignment - and you can follow their discussions if you search for the #esttp hashtag.
I visited their class last month and discussed various new forms of online science communication with them. Almost all of them also came to hear a wonderful presentation…
clock | February 26, 2010Listen to the podcast, post comments, ask questions - the new forum is now live and will go on for the next week:
How the Hidden Brain Controls Our Lives
We like to think of ourselves as conscious, rational beings.
But human behavior is largely driven by unconscious attitudes.
These attitudes reside in the deep recesses of the brain, and we ignore them at our own peril.
So says Washington Post journalist Shankar Vedantam.
Vedantam is the author of a new book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives.
Vedantam explores how the…
clock | February 24, 2010If you are interested in the topic of science journalism, how it's changing, what's new, and who's who in it, you are probably already reading Knight Science Journalism Tracker. If not, you should start now.
They have recently been digging around and finding projects with which I am involved in one way or another. For example, a few days ago, they profiled science blogs in general and scienceblogs.com in particular, but mainly focused on ResearchBlogging.org which aggregates and gives a stamp of approval to blog posts covering peer-reviewed research. The aggregator is a local thing - it is a…
clock | February 22, 2010I arrived in San Diego on Thursday night and checked in my hotel that was 6 miles away, almost in Mexico - I could see the lights of Tijuana from the hotel. I had to take a cab each morning and evening.
On Friday morning, I got up bright and early and came to the convention center, lugging my huge and heavy laptop with me. And that was the first surprise of the day - there was no wifi anywhere in the Convention Center, and almost no power outlets anywhere: something I am not used to as the meetings I tend to go to are pretty techie and take care of such details.
Not even speakers/panelists…
clock | February 15, 2010In San Diego this week. Check it out. I'll be there - see my session. If you will be there, let me know. Let's have coffee or lunch, etc. My session is on 21st in the morning, and there is a lot of social stuff I agreed to on the 19th in the afternoon and evening, and of course I want to see a lot of other sessions, but I am generally flexible. Just ping me over e-mail or Twitter or phone (if you have my number) or post a comment here.
clock | February 14, 2010A few days ago, I asked what it takes for a young person to start and, more importantly, continue for a longer term, to write a science blog. The comment thread on that post is quite enlightening, I have to say - check it out.
What is more important - that post started a chain-reaction on Twitter and blogs. Arikia Millikan, herself a young blogger, wrote a post in response which also attracted a lot of interesting comments. Go and comment.
Mason Posner wrote not one, but two posts in response: Science blogging in the classroom, an update and Young science bloggers need community. Go and…
clock | February 3, 2010Several items showed up recently that may be of interest to science bloggers, their readers, and related science communicators of various stripes....
A) Today, Eureka, the science section of London Times, published a list of Top 30 Science Blogs.
Every list that has me in it is a good list ;-)
They say "Zivkovic, who studies circadian rhythms, is an often-provocative evangelist for new media who has probably done more than anyone else to inspire scientists to blog. He is also a must-follow on Twitter, where he posts as @boraz"
They could have had a more diverse group (in sense of gender,…
clock | January 27, 2010You are a young journo. You get an assignment. You don't know where to start. But you follow and are followed by a bunch of scientists and science journalists you just met at ScienceOnline2010. So you tweet.....and within minutes your story takes off:
cassierodenberg: Starting to work on a lede graph for a story on plant-based medicines. Wish I could float off to a picturesque field right about now.
BoraZ: @cassierodenberg you may want to interview @abelpharmboy for that - he's the expert!
cassierodenberg: Twitter first: Updated status, then emailed by @abelpharmboy, scientist willing to lend…
clock | January 26, 2010One of the things I picked up from the hallway tables at Sigma Xi during the ScienceOnline2010 meeting were four latest issues of the American Scientist:
Now that I found a moment to sift through them a little bit, I got reminded why I think (and always thought) this is currently the best popular science magazine. Others have closed doors, or gradually declined, or went all sensationalist. But American Scientist keeps on publishing Good Stuff. I really need to support them, so, I promise that today I will subscribe to the print edition.
clock | January 25, 2010A few months ago, London Times started a new science section called Eureka. The Brits over on Nature Network are reading and critiquing it, mainly for its huge, gender disparity, both in the authors and in the number of scientists portrayed and in the ways they are portrayed. But this is not available to people here in the USA and I wanted to see it for myself. I actually I tried to get them to send 250 or so copies for our swag bag at ScienceOnline2010, but that did not work out this year. So I was very happy when Simon Frantz walked in the hotel and saw me and pulled out these two issues he…
clock | December 22, 2009If a publisher offered me a contract to write a book under a title that would be something like "Unscientific America", how would I go about it?
I would definitely be SUCH a scientist! But, being such a scientist does not mean indulging in Sesquipedalian Obscurantism. Being such a scientist means being dilligent, thorough and systematic in one's reasearch. And then being excited about presenting the findings, while being honest about the degree of confidence one can have in each piece of information.
I was not offered a book contract, and I do not have the resources and nine or twelve months…
clock | December 18, 2009The December 2009 edition of the Journal of Science Communication is now online with some intriguing articles - all Open Access so you can download all the PDFs and read:
Control societies and the crisis of science journalism:
In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault's work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to "discipline" (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by…
clock | September 27, 2009
Background
When Futurity.org, a new science news service, was launched last week, there was quite a lot of reaction online.
Some greeted it with approval, others with a "wait and see" attitude.
Some disliked the elitism, as the site is limited only to the self-proclaimed "top" universities (although it is possible that research in such places, where people are likely to be well funded, may be the least creative).
But one person - notably, a journalist - exclaimed on Twitter: "propaganda!", which led to a discussion that revealed the journalist's notion that press releases are…
clock | September 24, 2009Today, I accepted the invitation to join the editorial board of the Journal of Science Communication. Now I am reviewing my first manuscript....
clock | September 21, 2009The new issue of the open access Journal of Science Communication is out. From the Table of Contents:
Filling the gap between theory and practice:
Jcom's adventure was launched nearly eight years ago, when a group of lecturers and former students of the Master's degree in Science Communication at SISSA of Trieste, decided to have training joined by the commitment to research on science communication issues.
Mapping gender differences in understanding about HIV/AIDS:
The present article investigates public understanding of HIV/AIDS related issues that touch the thought structure of common…
clock | September 15, 2009There is a new site for you to bookmark today - Futurity.org. This is a collaborative effort of, for now, 35 major Universities in the United States (those include, for my local readers, UNC and Duke - why is NCSU lagging behind?!).
The site is the answer to the question:
How will the public learn about important breakthroughs at leading research universities as traditional news outlets continue to shrink?
The site is taking selected science stories from the participating Universities and putting them together in one place, sorted by topics and searchable by tags (by topic or by school). Let'…
clock | August 26, 2009Robert Scoble interviews science blogger and author Jennifer Ouellette about the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a "recent initiative by the National Academy of Sciences, was set up to build a new kind of social network of scientists and movie directors." Worth a watch: