Monthly Archives: March 2010

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Andy Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, CA to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I grew up in rural South Dakota, with a high school graduating class of only 16 students. From a very young age, I had always been fascinated by paleontology (the study of past life, including dinosaurs). Because I didn’t know any better, I started writing to paleontologists whose names I found in some of my books, asking for assistance with little research projects that I had devised. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew I was competing (and placing) in the Intel Science and Engineering Fair. (I feel just a twinge of personal pride over this, because I did rather well despite lacking access to the large research university labs and formal school programs that so many of my competitors had!) One of these projects led directly to my Ph.D. work at Stony Brook University, which I finished in 2008. Today, I’m a curator at Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California. Not only do I work as a researcher, but I’m also fortunate in that our museum is partnered with a high school (The Webb Schools), and many of the students from there are quite active in our museum’s research, outreach, and other activities. Because of my own experiences, I’m firmly convinced that science can be done by anyone, and that science should be accessible to everyone.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
A good portion of my career (indeed, beginning in high school) has been devoted to understanding the horned dinosaurs (Triceratops and their relatives). I’m particularly interested in how their massive skulls, measuring up to 3 meters in total length, functioned. Horned dinosaurs are odd, in that they have giant sinuses beneath the horns. Some researchers had speculated these sinuses functioned as shock absorbers during horn-to-horn combat, based on the observation that bighorn sheep and other modern horned animals also have big sinuses in their skulls. It turns out that we really don’t understand the sinuses even in modern animals – so many of my research efforts have focused on unraveling this problem. Other research projects have included describing and interpreting the evolutionary relationships of some new species of horned dinosaurs, paleopathology (the study of injury and disease in the fossil record), and the paleontology of Madagascar.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now, I’m working on advancing open science in my own field of paleontology. Open access publishing is certainly a part of this – I’m a volunteer section editor for paleontology at PLoS ONE. Paleontology is a science that relies heavily on lengthy descriptions and quality illustrations – but recent trends in science publishing mean that more and more of the “good stuff” is either consigned to effectively invisible supplemental information or just not published at all. It’s my hope that not only will electronic publications like PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica increase the exposure of our research, but that they will improve the quality of our research by allowing paleontologists to publish complete, well-illustrated descriptions of specimens from the start. Second, I’m a firm proponent of increasing data sharing and transparency. The vast majority of quantitative studies in paleontology quite frankly aren’t reproducible – the numbers behind the statistics are locked up on someone’s hard drive. With the ease of including supplemental information or depositing data in online archives, there is simply no excuse for this situation. So, I (along with several colleagues) am working on changing this attitude in our field.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think it’s really cool that it’s so easy to connect scientists with other scientists, and scientists with interested members of the general public. That’s part of the reason why Matt Wedel, Mike Taylor, and I founded the Open Dinosaur Project. In short, this project allows anyone with an internet connection (regardless of education, profession, or geographic location) to participate in dinosaur science. Our volunteers are helping us to amass a giant database of dinosaur limb bone measurements from the literature and museum specimens, which we’re analyzing to understand the evolution of dinosaur locomotion. Every aspect of the project is open – from data collection to publication. Our volunteers provide measurements, suggest analytical approaches, and much more. Most of the participants will be co-authors on the resulting paper!
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I blog at The Open Source Paleontologist as well as The Open Dinosaur Project. Through these blogs, I trade research techniques and philosophies with colleagues and try to advance the case for open science within our discipline. Blogging has been a great way to meet other researchers, developing friendships and collaborations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Facebook in particular is most widely used in paleo, and it’s proven to be useful for keeping up with everyone else’s research activities. There’s no doubt that all of this online activity is a huge positive.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I can honestly say that my earliest exposure to science blogs was through A Blog Around the Clock, and my reading list has ballooned since then. Among others, I always look forward to updates on Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, and Save Your Breath For Running Ponies (the funniest science blog, period). From ScienceOnline2010, I was happy to discover the blogs of Cameron Neylon, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Dorothea Salo, among others.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
My favorite part of ScienceOnline was getting to meet so many folks I had only heard of or communicated with through the Internet – people like Pete Binfield and Janet Stemwedel. Even better were those unexpected meetings with so many other open science advocates. I left the conference energized and excited about carrying on the push for open science!
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Mark MacAllister, Coordinator of On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoological Society to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born and educated in the Midwest–grew up in northwest Illinois, spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin, and went to undergrad school at Oberlin College. I then came south for the first of three tours of duty in North Carolina, including grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Also mixed in there is time spent living and working in Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Buffalo, Toronto, London and Chicago. I’m still a Midwesterner at heart, and really miss long sightlines and cold winters. But I love North Carolina, especially my current and quirky hometown of Pittsboro–it’s kind of like “The Andy Griffith Show” where every third person is a massage therapist. I work for the North Carolina Zoological Society, which is based in Asheboro, but telecommute from my shed-in-the-woods office in Pittsboro.
Philosophically, I tend to find myself most interested in the place where technology, education (especially K-12 but also for adults) and environmental advocacy come together. I feel that each one of those can be improved by the application of the other two–if that makes any sense. I’m an early adopter in all three, and have been lucky enough to be able to be involved in somewhat radically new things in each area. I’ve been self-teaching on computers since 1982, beginning with a Kaypro running CP/M. My Master’s degree is in Environmental Policy and Law, meaning that I took half my coursework in UNC’s Political Science department and the other half through the Law School. And, as far as teaching goes–one of the nicest compliments anyone ever paid me was to call me a “natural teacher,” meaning that I don’t have a teaching license but I somehow manage to pull it off.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
After grad school, my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City. I spent five years out there working on wilderness advocacy. I did a lot of research in the field–getting paid to hike and camp in the deserts of southern Utah was a great gig–and also in the public document rooms of various state and federal agencies. The advocacy groups I worked with were involved in mining, grazing, water rights, logging and other threats to wilderness preservation. What I began to notice toward the end of my tenure there was that many issues that appeared to be landscape-related were actually endangered species-related, and as a result I began to become more interested in species preservation.
We came back to North Carolina and in 1996 I went to work for the Chatham County Schools administrative office. The state was just beginning to wire classrooms, the Internet was just beginning to find its footing in terms of K-12 education, and Chatham understood early on that a significant teacher training effort would need to follow close on the heels of the effort to get everything wired. My job was in many ways focused on creating an atmosphere of support for integrating the Internet into classrooms; in other words, I was asked to help teachers understand why adopting technology was in everyone’s best interest, and then to work with them to actually help them gain those skills. Not long after we got started, Chatham was recognized as one of the ten top technology school districts in the country.
While this was all going on, I found myself thinking more and more about the content of the K-12 curriculum. It seemed obvious that a wonderful way to interest kids and meet curriculum goals was to focus the whole deal on the study of animals and wildlife, and to do so with technology-rich methods. I approached the Education Curator at the North Carolina Zoo, and not long after that we were partnering to build two websites focused on field-based wildlife research. These sites eventually evolved into FieldTripEarth, which is one of the many things I’m working on these days. I’ve been at the Zoo for ten years now, and have seen through a variety of other projects, ranging from teacher education (in both the US and Africa) to social media planning to field-based informal education.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I’m often thinking about “raw learning materials” (this is David Warlick’s term, see Landmark Project) and how to best put them into the hands of students and teachers. I’m not particularly interested in curriculum–that is, in designing and assembling big packages of resources that teachers can then plug into their classrooms. Rather, I’m curious about how best to make original source material available to classrooms and, better yet, how to put those classrooms in contact with the people that actually generate those source materials (By source materials, I mean first-person narratives, photos, video, datasets, maps and so on that, taken together, tell a story about what a scientist or other field researcher is working on). FieldTripEarth wheels and deals in exactly this currency, and we’ve been successful in providing classrooms a way to access these materials from researchers working all over the world. What they do with them is, for the most part, up to the students and teachers–we do offer some generalized strategies for using the materials found on the website, but for the most part we urge everyone to apply them to meet their specific needs.
What I wish I could spend more time on–or at least be more successful at doing–is bringing various classrooms into substantive contact with each other. I don’t mean waving at each other through Skype…rather, what I’m on the lookout for are ways to help students in various locations work together to solve learning problems, to interview field scientists, to author a video about a particular topic, and so on. I think there’s a lot of potential in this, but I’m not convinced that teachers and administrators will buy into it.
More generally, I’m interested in teaching process and thinking skills to whoever will sit still long enough to learn them. What we commonly call the scientific method can of course be used to learn in any academic or technical area. Unfortunately, most schools aren’t teaching thinking as an organized process; that’s why I try to focus on the work being done by field researchers, because I consider them role models of sorts when it comes thinking that is both multi-disciplinary and systematic.
I have some other goals, of course. I’d like to figure out a way to make hiking and biking more a part of the K-12 classroom. I’d like to read and write more, and to think out loud with colleagues more frequently.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’ve never really taken to blogging as part of my work, though I do read several blogs focused on politics and policy, both of which are hobby horses of mine. Twitter and Facebook are a relatively small part of my professional life, mostly because right now my employer focuses more on their utility in serving members than in educating them. I think these tools form a net positive, but will be much more relevant once we figure out how to use them as educational, rather than informational, resources.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best thing about the conference was witnessing the various interests people brought with them–as well as the varying levels of expertise. It helped me remember that this is still such an evolving area. The sessions were all strong, but for the most part my strongest impressions were formed outside of the meeting rooms.
As far as suggestions for next year–it would be cool to invite some consumers of science communication and let us see how they put it to work in their lives. There was a bit of that at 2010, but there’s a lot of untapped experience out there.
And while we’re at it, I’d love to have a session focused on the question “How do we make our students’ experiences with technology at school at least as rich and relevant as the experiences they are having outside of school?”
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Andrew Thaler from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m originally from Baltimore, but moved to North Carolina 8 years ago for undergrad and never looked back. I currently live in Beaufort, NC. I’m working towards my Ph.D in Deep Sea Population Genetics at the Duke University Marine Lab. I was the kid who wanted to be a marine biologist since I was six.
Philosophically I guess you could call me a Happy Fatalist. We’ve profoundly changed the world and anthropogenic influences on the environment are going to be the driving force for almost all societal change in the foreseeable future, but I’m less panicked about the way things are changing and more excited to be part of the largest experiment in human history. Most of the changes we’re going to see in the next few decades are unavoidable, we’ve passed the tipping point. People are often afraid to admit that, but eventually we need to not just reduce our impact on the environment, but also preparing for the major changes that are going to happen. We love to promote the myth of a balanced environment that’s somehow being upset, but the environment is always changing. The sooner we accept that environmentalism is about human values and not so archetypal perfect environment, the better off we’re going to be in the long run.
So I come from the position that we need to shift our focus from how to prevent changes to how we’re going to deal with the inevitable.
My scientific background is largely in marine biology and population genetics, with a brief segue into mycology for a couple of years.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I started off working as an Aquarist Assistant at the National Aquarium in Baltimore rearing seahorses. That was my first real chance to design my own experiments. I was part of the Syngnathid Breeding Program, and some of my seahorses are still swimming around aquariums throughout the world. From there I upgraded to a lab tech in a Mycology lab before entering grad school. I started my grad career studying the biodiversity of deep sea fungi that occur at methane seeps. No one had ever really looked at deep sea fungi, so I thought I was all cool breaking new ground. As it turns out, there just isn’t that much fungi down there, or if there is, it’s very elusive. I’m currently putting together a crowdsourced guide to conservation genetics geared towards managers and the general public.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now I’m just trying to make it through my Preliminary exams intact. Blogging is acting as my stress relief outlet (which is why most of my posts recently have been jokes about Global Draining). Other than that, I’m brewing experimental beers. My last batch I replaced all of the grains with green tea leaves to create a sort of Green Tea Pale Ale. It should be ready in a couple weeks, so I’ll let you know how it turns out.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’ve been really excited about Twitter lately. Suddenly I have a huge collection of experts available whenever I need them. Just send out a quick question and I usually get 5 or 6 answers by the end of the day.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
My undergrad institution was one of the first to get Facebook, so I’ve been on it for pretty much my entire academic career, so I have no idea if it’s been a net positive or negative. Twitter for sure is neutral, I get tons of help from my twitter network, but it can also be a huge time sink. All in all I feel like online activity follows the old (ways to be more efficient)/(ways to procrastinate) = no net change.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I got into science blogging through Kevin Zelnio, who I share an office with. My favorites are for sure the marine blogs – Deep Sea News, Oyster’s Garter (which I guess is Deep Sea News now too), Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets, blogfish. I met nearly all the cool science blogs I follow from Science Online 09 and this years conference.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
This was the first time I went in with a smart phone, and the amount of content that was streaming out of the twitterverse was astounding. It was almost like I could listen in on four conferences at once. It might be nice to have a closing keynote to bring everyone back together at the end of the meeting as well as the beginning.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thank you and I can’t wait for the next conference.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Andrea Novicki from the Duke CIT blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hi, thank you so much for asking. I’m currently employed at Duke University in the Center for Instructional Technology as an academic technology consultant for the sciences – I work with faculty who teach science or math, to help them figure out how to effectively and efficiently help students learn, using technology. My work is a satisfying combination of science, education and technology. Scientifically, I began as a marine biologist as an undergraduate and in early grad school; still, marine biology feels like my natural home. I became inspired by a summer course to study neural systems and behavior, because investigating changes in behavior at the level of changes in molecules in single, identified neurons was both exciting and satisfying. After a couple of postdocs and a tenure track faculty position, I stepped away from research and teaching and I went sailing, driven by a restless sense of adventure. I’m now back in academia, working with smart, interesting people.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I have been involved with some great projects; if there is a theme, it is change, both in my research projects and in my career. I’ve investigated the neural pathways that mediate color change in squid and octopus and I participated in research cruises identifying midwater ocean animals. On land I worked with insects, monitoring and altering activity in single neurons that correlate with behavior change, and predicting and then, satisfyingly, finding a neuron with particular characteristics.
I (and many other people) began to question the traditional lecture way that science was taught and early on, I began using computers and technology to help students learn biology.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My goals? Do I have to be realistic? I’d like to contribute to making science accessible; I’d like for everyone to recognize the beautiful complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world at all scales, and find joy of figuring out for themselves how things work.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m excited about the increased openness and social nature of science. In my grad school days, the model was that successful scientists kept to themselves until they published, and then only in reputable, peer-reviewed journals; anything else was considered frivolous and distracting. Now, because of the web, science is now more public and more accessible (accessible both technologically and in presentation style). I’m a huge fan of Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook science approach, ever since I heard him speak at the first science blogging conference. This project (and many others) make the process of science more open. Passionate blogs by students and post docs as well as people who run their own labs show what science is really like – it’s done by caring people with feelings and emotions, not just some distant, always-right white-coated professor. This openness about the process, as well as the explanations of results made accessible (like at researchblogging.org) have the potential to illustrate the appeal of science to everyone.
I’d like to see people use some of the new visualization tools to explore publically available data sets to make new discoveries, just because they are curious, regardless of their final degrees or institutional affiliation.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I lurk on numerous blogs, and I love scienceblogs, it’s a great way to keep up on how science is changing, and visit my favorite topics. I’m very fortunate, in that monitoring how people use technology to communicate science (for science education) is part of my job. I follow people on Twitter and find it a useful way to find new ideas and resources, and contribute occasionally. Although I do have an account on Facebook, I rarely look at it.
I do contribute to a blog, but it’s more about technology in education than about science, and is part of my job. As a confirmed introvert, I find blogging difficult. I am, by nature, a lurker. I’m in awe of people who can toss off a post without thinking it over and over and over.
In other words, all of this online activity is necessary for my work; I do not contribute enough, but I benefit tremendously.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Every session I attended was thought-provoking! Stacy Baker’s students stole the show again; my notes have many observations about their attitudes towards technology. I also welcomed the sessions by librarians – their ability to find information, and think about how it is organized will continue to be invaluable.
I observed that the conference had many people attending who were not exactly science bloggers (people like me, for example), which showed how many options there are for people to participate in science online in some way, even if they are not, strictly speaking, science bloggers.
There’s still something wonderful about meeting someone for the first time after you’ve already read their writing – it’s like you can peek into their brain. When you meet a blogger (or any writer), your first impression has already been formed and modified and added to, and their physical appearance is irrelevant. It’s an almost utopian ideal – people are judged by the quality of their thoughts, not what they look like.
At one session, during a discussion of Google Earth and GIS, Cameron Neylon thought aloud about using visualizations as a way of distributing data, which is something I had been thinking about, as a way of making science, and raw data, more accessible. He, of course, said it more elegantly and I will be thinking about this for some time. How can good visualizations be used as a way of distributing data, in a way that does not immediately shape a conclusion but allows for exploration?
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I’m sure I’ll see you before then, and I expect you’ll join our event again next January.