ScienceOnline

Tonight, I'm going to be speaking on a panel at the University of Washington with fellow science bloggers: Alan Boyle (@b0yle) from CosmicLog and some company called "NBC" news. (I only watch TV programs on Netflix and iTunes, these days, so I forget TV stations still exist.) Brendan DeMelle (@bdemelle) from DeSmog Blog, and the Huffington Post and Adrienne Roehrich (@fiainros) from Double X Science  More details and event information can be found at our event page at Seattle Science Online.  #ScioSEA Photo courtesy of Mandy Hunter, Madison College. I feel really fortunate to be in…
Ivan Oransky and I moderated a session last week at ScienceOnline, the yearly conference covering all things at the intersection of science and the internets. We discussed the topic ""How to make sure you're being appropriately skeptical when covering scientific and medical studies." We started out discussing some of the resources we'd put up at the Wiki link. Ivan teaches medical journalism at NYU, and noted that he recommends these criteria when evaluating medical studies. I noted I use similar guidelines, and as a scientist, think about papers in a journal club format before I cover them…
My friend Henry Gee at Nature Network wrote a few thoughts about how issues of race, gender and communication were discussed at the recent ScienceOnline2010 conference (#scio10 for the Twitter inclined). In his post he raises what he felt were unfair criticisms to his comments about laying ground rules to enforce civil conversation in science blog posts: I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules - as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts - and I hope he won't mind my quoting it in extenso: 'This is my living room, so don't piss on the…
This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session). John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one…
2. Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web (description here): Sciblings Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science and David Dobbs of Neuron Culture as well as the author of Reef Madness and the forthcoming The Orchid and the Dandelion, joined science writer extraordinaire (and duck sex enthusiast) Carl Zimmer and cell biologist/blogger John Timmer for an excellent discussion of what science journalism means in the age of the internet. The take home message was that science journalism is in a state of flux. What had previously been traditional journalism in which the reporter…
This past weekend I was in Durham, North Carolina (my old stomping grounds) attending the annual ScienceOnline Conference that focuses on science communication in the digital age. I am pleased to report that Anton and Bora have built on their previous successes to accomplish something rare for a conference: it was both relevant and refreshingly innovative. In the next few posts I will highlight some of the workshops I attended and what the important message I got from the panelists involved: 1. From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing (…
Next week, I'll be chairing a session at the Science Online 2010 conference called Rebooting science journalism in the age of the web. I'll be shooting the breeze with Carl Zimmer, John Timmer and David Dobbs about the transition of journalism from sheets of plant pulp to wires and wi-fi. The title of the talk had been set before the panel was assembled but, being biologists at heart, we're going to shift the metaphor from a technological one to an evolutionary one. As a species, science journalists (in all their varied forms and behaviours) have found themselves thrust into a new digital…
Today kicks off the first day of events of the third annual ScienceOnline conference in North Carolina. Founded in 2007 by veteran ScienceBlogger, Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock, ScienceOnline is the first conference devoted to discussing science as its role changes with the expansion of the internet. Several ScienceBloggers have traveled far and wide to attend the conference and participate in the events.