Monthly Archives: May 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 Fenella Saunders from The American Scientist 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 in England, raised in New York City, did my undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina, went back to New York for 10 years, then came back to NC five years ago. I have a master’s degree in animal behavior from Hunter College of the City University of New York, where I did my thesis on the interactions of proboscis monkeys in captivity. My undergraduate degree is in computer science with a minor in Japanese, although I chose my major with the concept of going into science journalism.
While I was at college I discussed the education I would need with a number of science journalists, all of whom told me that an education in science, with outside projects to get journalism experience, was the best way to go. (I am from the era just before when it became pretty much standard for science writers to go to an MA program for science journalism.) A computer science major allowed me to study a broad range of sciences and technology, and it also gave me a backup plan in case journalism didn’t work out. At school I wrote for any venue I could get into (and I was lucky that in addition to a regular school paper with a health/medicine section, Duke had both a student-run science and a technology magazine), and in my senior year I wrote a couple of small pieces freelance for Popular Mechanics.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My career started when I landed an internship at Discover Magazine, then got hired on. It was largely a matter of luck and timing: They had a lot of biology people and needed someone with a technology background. I stayed at Discover for about eight years, and ended up also being the online editor toward the end of that time. There were a ton of great moments at that job, but I would have to say my favorite one was when they allowed me to start writing about a different, new robot in each month’s news section. It was a series that lasted 2-3 years, and I never ran out of new robotics research to write about. During that time I freelanced a little, most notably as a co-author for a Time-Life book called “Space 2100.” I left Discover to work on publications for NYU School of Medicine for about two years, which was a very different experience. Probably the best part of that job was learning all about really high-powered MRI machines. For the past five years I’ve been at American Scientist, where I am now a senior editor. It is both fascinating and a challenge working with different scientists each issue, trying to get them to explain their own work for a general audience. I couldn’t even begin to pick a favorite from all of the articles I’ve helped bring to print–it could be anything from Champagne bubbles to snow flakes to honeybee nest relocation.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
American Scientist is published every two months, so we always confront the problem of remaining timely. We want to find more ways to keep in contact with our readers between issues. We recently relaunched our Web site, which allowed us to better keep up with technology in a few ways. We’re now able to embed video with the online versions of articles. We now also post podcasts of our lunch-speaker series. I am excited that I have been chosen as a fellow to attend on of the Knight Digital Media Center’s multimedia workshops, where I’ll learn more about how to edit audio, video and maybe program some Flash animation. I am hoping that after I attend that workshop, I will be better equipped to have us do more multimedia for the magazine online.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The immediacy of the Web still is its biggest advantage in my mind. Something can be posted for all of the world to see within minutes, and if you are looking for information on a specific topic, a quick search will pull up enough reading to last hours. It’s a very democratic platform, as anyone can post on it, but that makes it all the more important to make sure that sources are reputable and verifiable–I am pretty sure that we all rely too much on the truthfulness of Wikipedia these days. I am also hopeful that the Web can make information, about science or anything, more accessible to people who, say, don’t have the luxury of going to college, or find themselves in a position of having to learn about something new that they never thought about doing.
That being said, I am still unsure of how the print vs. online debate is going to shake out. There is something to be said for picking up a whole magazine, not just a specific article you were looking for. It is broadening to be exposed to topics you might not have even realized existed. People are busy, so in some ways it’s faster just to pick up a print copy rather than have to search and dig online. Perhaps platforms such as the iPad will change all this. But I know that, when I have the time, just browsing through publications in the library is the best way for me to get new ideas.
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?
It’s fairly bizarre for a publication not to use all social-media platforms possible these days. We send out a daily and a weekly conglomeration of science news, and we tweet about these entries daily as well. We also use twitter to talk about what’s in our latest issue, and we tweet about any news that relates to a past story that we have done. We have groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. We don’t have a set blog yet, although we are working on it, but our Computing Science columnist, Brian Hayes, has a regular one at bit-player.org.
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?
Carl Zimmer is a former colleague of mine at Discover magazine, and he was an early entry into the blogosphere, so his was probably the first blog that I followed. I was happy to meet Ed Yong at the conference, and I follow his blog “Not Exactly Rocket Science.” I’ve also been following Rebecca Skloot’s blog about her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
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?
I really liked the fact that there were kids at the conference. Kids often are not brought into the dialogue when discussing science, particularly science journalism. Sometimes they are the target audience, but they are rarely part of the process. For a few years we did a mentoring program with a local middle school where we’d have kids come in for a week, but they’d rotate, so I’d get each student for only one day. I challenged them that they would write a whole science news story by the end of the day, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, but they all did it. Children can do amazing things if given the opportunity, and can provide unique insight. I found it particularly enlightening that the young students at ScienceOnline 2010 thought that Twitter was an adult thing–they saw no real use for it in their lives, preferring more interactive platforms such as Facebook.
I can’t say my usual “It was so nice to meet you in person” because I see you often, but certainly thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

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 Jeremy Yoder from University of Idaho and the Denim and Tweed blog to answer a few questions. Jeremy came to ScienceOnline2010 as one of the two winners of the NESCent blogging contest.
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?
Hello, and many thanks for having me! I’m not sure how best to start this, so I’ll just go from the beginning:
I grew up very Mennonite in rural Pennsylvania (no, there were no buggies involved). I’m more-or-less an agnostic now, but my thinking is still strongly influenced by Mennonite values of peacemaking, simplicity, and independent inquiry.
I had my first taste of field biology in my senior year of high school, when one of my science teachers led the class through a forest survey in a woodlot adjacent to the campus. By cataloguing the trees according to their age class and species, we were able to deduce how mature the woodland was, and what it might look like in another hundred years. It opened up this vision of species jostling against each other, accommodating as well as competing to shape the landscape right outside my front door, and it seemed like a pretty cool thing to do for a living.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
From high school on I did my best to arrange to spend time outdoors. I majored in environmental science as an undergraduate, and then spent a year interning with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, working on plant community ecology among other projects. When I started to think about graduate school, I knew I wanted to study coevolution — the ways in which interacting species shape each other’s evolutionary history — and I was lucky enough to connect with Olle Pellmyr, who was looking for a new graduate student to work on his current study of Joshua trees and the moths that pollinate them.
Joshua tree populations are exclusively pollinated by one or the other of two different species of yucca moths. It turns out that trees from populations with different pollinators look pretty different themselves, and we now have good reason to think that the moths’ preferences for their “native” type of Joshua tree determines how often the two tree types can interbreed. A big part of my dissertation work is to use DNA sampling from Joshua trees across the whole Mojave desert to estimate how completely the two types of Joshua tree are isolated, and how much coevolution with the moths is responsible for the differences we see in the two types of tree. Before I started grad school, I’d never seen a North American desert — now I’ve been to just about every place Joshua trees grow, from the south rim of the Grand Canyon to the outer suburbs of Los Angeles and (I kid you not) just outside of Area 51.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My dissertation is far and away my biggest preoccupation, you won’t be surprised to hear. I’ve just had a couple of projects accepted for publication — a literature review and an analysis that reconstructs some characteristics of the ancestors of yucca moths. I’m (hopefully) nearly done with a mathematical model that compares how different kinds of coevolutionary interactions affect the species involved, and I’m heavily occupied with the Joshua tree DNA analysis right now. My plan is to complete my doctorate by about this time next year, and I’m starting to think about possible postdoctoral work (hint, hint!).
I’m also keeping up with writing on Denim and Tweed for the time being, and I’m thinking about running what will be my second marathon sometime this fall. Hopefully, I’ll find some time to get out and enjoy the wilderness out here in the Pacific Northwest this summer, too, since this might be the last year I spend within a day’s drive of both Olympic and Glacier National Parks.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Most academic biologists spend time teaching in addition to their research, and I really believe that telling the general public about my work is a logical extension of that principle — that being a scientist means communicating what you learn to others, not just accumulating knowledge to satisfy your own curiosity. The Web is a great venue for that, thanks to user-friendly blog hosting services and networks like Research Blogging and the Nature Blog Network that connect interested readers to my site. I now list D&T as a “broader impact” on all my grant applications.
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 try to treat Denim and Tweed as an exercise in writing about science for a general audience — so it has that value for me even if no one reads it. In that sense, it’s a little like a one-man journal club, in which I sit down every week and read one paper carefully enough to explain it to someone else in about 700 words.
The blog is pretty heavily linked into my online social network as well — I have a public account on Twitter that I use regularly, and a FriendFeed profile that ties together the blog, my Flickr account, and my Facebook profile. And I interact with family, personal acquaintances, colleagues, and readers of D&T across all those platforms — over my last field trip, I’d post photos from Flickr to the blog, and have folks comment about them on my Facebook wall. It’s not very tidy, but every one of those networks seems to reach a slightly different set of people, so I guess I’m thoroughly enmeshed.
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’ve been reading science blogs since long before it occurred to me to start writing on my own — I don’t remember exactly how I got started, but my first contact was probably when someone sent me a snarky link from Pharyngula. I think I probably didn’t have a sense of the full scope of the science blogosphere before I found Research Blogging, though.
Through RB, I’ve found great sites like The EEB & flow, Conservation Maven, and Open Source Paleontologist, and even occasionally exchanged thoughts in the comments or via back-and-forth posts. Research Blogging is really a fantastic way to get started in writing about science on your own blog, both because it’s easy to add your posts to a feed lots of other science bloggers read and because it helps you find other people writing about the sort of science that interests you.
And then, after I’d been involved in RB for more than a year, I was lucky enough to be able to attend ScienceOnline 2010, and meet in person a number of folks I really only knew as text on the screen — and, yes, add a number of links to my RSS list, including Observations of a Nerd. I think I picked up far more Twitter feeds than blogs at ScienceOnline, though — so much of the conference conversation occurred on Twitter that it was basically unavoidable. And now I probably get more of my online science news via folks I’m following on Twitter than even through the RSS feeds I have bookmarked in Firefox.
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?
I think the biggest benefit I took from ScienceOnline2010 was a better sense of where I fit in the world of online science communication, in my role as a scientist with a blog. I saw some great models of how to draw the public into ongoing scientific work using online tools, and even how to engage the public in the actual science. I also saw some great sessions that addressed interactions among different groups of people involved in science communication — working scientists, educators, and science journalists. It was a really fun weekend all around, and it gave me a lot to think about as I work towards the (still pretty distant!) day when I’m ready to set up my own lab and research program.
It was so nice to meet you in person 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 Jack from Miss Baker’s Biology class at Staten Island Academy, to answer a few questions. Jack wrote about his experience at ScienceOnline2010 here and wrote a blog post about video/computer games here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you from?
I’m Jack, a freshman student who went to Science Online 2010. I am one of Miss Baker’s students and I’m from NJ. I go to school at Staten Island Academy. I currently play the piano but I am planning to get a drum set to teach myself drums, too. I love making things whether it be some random contraption built out of paper or a game to be put online. I always liked making things since I built stuff with legos when I was in lower school.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I enjoy using photoshop and flash together to make games. Recently, I decided to also write out my own music for the games. I am currently making a few games that have absorbed most of my free time. Between painstakingly creating graphics and filtering through code to thinking of music for the games, my free time is pretty much gone. As for my goals, I always wanted to design and create new devices or develop new software. I really want to go to M.I.T. for college, and I’ve been doing my best in and out of school to try and get there. On a completely different note, I also want to learn Japanese.
What particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I enjoy the amount of freedom that the web gives people, as anyone can access a world-wide database of knowledge for almost any subject. I currently surf the web to find aid in the programming world whenever I have trouble with a script. I also enjoy how the web can be used as a great device for gathering information and doing research. As I move along in developing my programming skills, it is great to talk with fellow programmers to brainstorm possible techniques of getting around difficulties like run time or complex functions.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work and school? 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 and want to accomplish?
Using Facebook has helped me immensely as it is quicker and more open than e-mailing, so if I or someone else needs a little help with something, they can simply put it up and one of their friends can help out. I also think it is a great way to spread cool articles and facts. Twitter on the other hand has been abused by hundreds of people. No, I really don’t care that you are “enjoying your microwavable pizza” mrtwittrface. Because of all of the “eating this” or “listening to that” tweets on Twitter, I really can’t get into it.
As Miss Baker, when teaching the Biology class, gives you a lot of creative freedom, how does that affect your own interest in the subject? Do you think you learn better this way? What would you suggest to do differently to make it even better? What are some of your own projects you did for the class?
Of course, I found it easier to learn by writing a blog post and commenting on others. Having the creative freedom allowed me to learn what I wanted to, while also allowing the output of the project to be read and understood by people who aren’t just my classmates. Not only was I able to learn about how video games affect the brain, but I also got to make a game and work on my programming.
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?
I loved the fact that people were able to come together for a few days to talk about how the internet is used in science. It was cool to be one of the 8 kids there looking at everything from a different view than most of the other people there. I can’t believe that while I was presenting, Beth Beck (jokingly) asked, “Would you like a job at NASA?” but I was so focused on not messing up that the question just flew over my head. I didn’t want to ruin my opportunity to present at a conference in front of scientists and journalists and everyone else who was there, too. Because of that moment, I’m now working harder than before on my “occupation” of making flash games, as I realized that I could make a positive impact with my programming knowledge, but I need to keep working on getting better first.
It was so nice to meet you in person 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 Karyn Hede 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 think of myself as a scientist who writes, even though I jumped out of research after graduate school. Most of my formal education is in science. I was biology/chemistry major and then studied genetics in graduate school at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. I should have known I would end up a science communicator though. As an undergraduate, I performed in a “chemistry magic show.” We would go around to elementary and middle schools and get kids involved in the show. It was fantastic to see kids get engaged and to realize that science can be fun. After I committed to making the switch to writing about science and medicine, I studied journalism at UNC-CH. This was well before the medical journalism program existed. I was the oddball. I like to think I helped plant the seed for that program. I’ve spent my whole career telling stories about medicine, science and scientists.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My first professional writing gig was for a local publication called Triangle Business Journal. I talked the editor into letting me write personality profiles of local scientists. My first interview was with George Hitchings, of the [now defunct] Burroughs Wellcome Co., who had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was so gracious, and I was so nervous! Many years later, I was working as communications officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a post now occupied by the inestimable Russ Campbell, when Dr. Hitchings passed away. We went over to the old Burroughs Wellcome offices to collect some of his memorabilia for display. They had his personal scrapbook there – he had cut out the article I wrote and put it in his scrapbook. That remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid as a writer.
I was senior science writer at Duke Medical Center for four years. I learned how to put together broadcast-quality video and how to organize and run a news conference. It was a hectic job, and I spent a lot of my time responding to media requests. I discovered I prefer to be on the other side of the equation. I like to be the one asking questions.
Currently, I am a news correspondent for Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for the journal Science’s Careers site. I also write for magazines and science organizations.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?
An undercurrent within my work has always been career development for scientists. When I was a graduate student, you were pretty much on your own as far as exploring career options and developing professional skills. I enjoy teaching and helping support the next generation of scientists. In the last couple of years I have done some consulting work with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to promote professional science masters programs with the state. We organized a meeting around the issue in 2008. I’ve also been working with Russ Campbell on a series of professional development booklets for scientists. Recently, I started teaching scientific writing for biomedical graduate students at UNC. I taught two courses, one for first-year students and a second course I developed for students who are working their first grant or their dissertation. It’s my way of giving back.
What are your goals?
I am also into gardening and the local food movement. I subscribe to a local CSA at Maple Spring Gardens. A few years ago I organized a session at the National Association of Science Writers meeting to get science writers more interested in covering how our food is produced. Since then, the topic has gotten a lot of coverage, with Michael Pollan’s fantastic books and all the concern over outbreaks of food-borne disease. I’d love to write more about the intersection of science and food production.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think the wave of the future in science communication is going to be scientists engaging directly with people through their own blogs, videos and websites. Some people (like you!) are naturals and don’t need any help. I know scientists who would like to move more into this arena, but don’t know how to get started. I’d like to work with scientists to help them develop those communication and storytelling skills.
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 read blogs and have gotten story ideas from blogs. I don’t have a blog (yet). I like to let ideas percolate for awhile before writing. The thought of having to produce coherent posts every day (or nearly so) is a bit daunting. My Facebook connections are mostly old friends from college and family. I like LinkedIn for work-related networking – it’s a bit more professional and I like having more control over the content.
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 lived in Washington state for several years and moved back to North Carolina a couple of years ago. In my absence, I discovered an enthusiastic on-line science blogging community had grown up here. I wasn’t surprised. This has always been a science-rich area – blogging is just the latest incarnation of the local science communications community, but with a much wider reach now. I read your blog, Drugmonkey, Female Science Professor, The Intersection, and Terra Sigillata, among others.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
This was my first time attending ScienceOnline. I was impressed with the sessions and particularly the workshops on Fri. The sessions on visualization in science were valuable, because I was teaching at the time and was able to gather a lot of incredible resources for my students. Meeting so many interesting people who are inventing the future of science communication was great. I’d love to see more of a mashup of working scientists and science communicators shaping the agenda next year.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you can come 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 Sonia Stephens 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)?
Sure. I’m originally from Minnesota, but moved to Hawaii when I was young. Now I’m living in Florida. So geographically, I’ve been all over the place, but I probably consider Hawaii “home”. I was always interested in science and nature while growing up – while I was in Hawaii, that interest focused a bit on evolution and extinction. Hawaii is one of the evolution hotspots of the world, and now it’s unfortunately one of the extinction hotspots as well. There are many, many biological, political, social, and economic factors that have combined to create this situation in the Hawaiian Islands. Invasive species, climate change, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels are some specific problems that make it really obvious that “culture” and “nature” are not, and can never be, separate. This idea made a big impression on me in college, so my interest in ecology now is in this interface of the human and natural worlds.
What is your (scientific) background? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
At the University of Hawaii, I studied the ecology of stream algae for my Master’s. After graduating, I worked for the National Park Service on a program to inventory and set up a long-term monitoring plan for Pacific Island park natural resources. I started out working on streams and other freshwater ecosystems, some of which are pretty funky, like anchialine pools. These are brackish systems found in rocky coastal areas in Hawaii, connected to both fresh and salty groundwater through crevices in the basalt substrate. They harbor a unique flora and fauna that can cope with tidal changes in salinity. They’re also culturally hugely important, as the only surface-level freshwater on these incredibly hot, dry coastal lava plains. Unfortunately, they’re also hugely threatened by groundwater pollution, coastal development, and invasive species. So these were some of the key resources that the NPS wanted to protect.
The point at which I started to get interested in science communication was when I began working more in-depth on the actual writing of the monitoring plan, as well as coming up with conceptual models and diagrams to illustrate ecosystems and processes (like anchialine pools). I found it really interesting and challenging to translate some of the complicated ideas into pictures as tools to communicate with the public. A whole different question, though, is how to actually get those explanations and illustrations out to people. Traditionally, the NPS creates park displays, which can only be visited in person, and reports and newsletters, which are now downloadable. But these aren’t necessarily the most far-reaching communication methods.
What I’m interested in doing is exploring how scientific organizations can use online tools to communicate with the public. Right now, I’m a PhD student at the University of Central Florida, in the Texts & Technology program. This is a humanities-based program that emphasizes study of digital media, so it’s pretty interdisciplinary in both methodology and subject matter. What I’d like to do is shed some light on what online tools work best for what purposes, and why some tools work better for some types of communication than others.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Well, as a grad student, classes and teaching are definitely taking up most of my time. Since my program is based in an English department, I’m teaching college composition this academic year as part of my financial support, which has been quite a learning experience for me. This summer and next semester, I’ll be going into taking my candidacy exams and planning research (assuming the exams go well), so that will take up the majority of my time. In my research, I’m planning to use both visual and science communication theories to look at online science communication. I’m definitely interested in doing some empirical research, but those ideas are still taking shape.
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 don’t have a blog, but I’ve been slowly dipping my toes into the social network aspect of the Internet. Facebook is a great way to keep track of what people are doing, but it does add to the occasional multitasking frenzy, so I’m not sure whether it’s a net positive yet… My main interest in these tools is more along the lines of asking what they’re good for, in terms of working on public understanding of science. I know a lot of writers like to use blogging as sort of a journaling tool, or a place to play with ideas. I’ve never really enjoyed journaling, but I’m starting to see how it might be useful in preparing for my exams (an idea I got from reading Christina Pikas’s blog), so that might be a good way to get started blogging. Right now, I have a fairly basic website online but I’m hoping to upgrade that soon…
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 do read several of the blogs on the Science Blogs site, but honestly I usually just go to the 24-hour feed and look at what posts seem interesting. I do read a couple of nature blogs pretty regularly- one is by Julie Zickefoose, a nature writer & illustrator. and the other is by a birder, Sharon Stiteler. The rest of the blogs I read are generally politically oriented.
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?
Well, one of the questions that seemed to keep coming up at the meeting was: we have all these online tools to communicate with the public, but what tools work best in what situations? There’s a need for research on how well efforts at online science communication work in what situations. Which, obviously, is where I’m trying to go with my studies. I won’t promise to give a complete answer 🙂 but maybe I’ll be able to shed some light on this question.
I also saw a huge diversity of opinion about what science communication is, what blogging is for, whether we should be striving for science literacy vs. public understanding of science, etc. For these more philosophical questions, the answers really depend on the person doing the communicating. I think listening to the talks at the meeting and participating in some conversations helped me clarify some of those answers for myself and think about where I’d like to focus in my work. Personally, I’m involved in environmental activism, and I think that simply educating people about the science behind environmental issues is a huge step in creating sustainable social change. So my focus is on the public understanding of science, with the underlying goal of making the connections between “culture” and “nature” more obvious. Maybe in a few years, if I keep banging my head on a wall of public miseducation about statistics, for example, I’ll shift my focus to science literacy. But for now, I’ll try to start at least a little smaller!
It was so nice to meet you in person 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 Antony Williams from ChemSpider 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? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Hi Bora…thanks for the invitation to connect! Where do I come from? When people meet me they’ll interpret my mongrel accent in many ways assuming that I am from Australia commonly (especially the Canadians) or from England (which is of course the common term for the United Kingdom over here). Well, I am from the UK but I am Welsh, not English. Earlier in life I was going to be a Welsh teacher but it’s been almost 30 years since I had a conversation in Welsh! I grew up in a small village in Wales of less than a hundred people. From there I went to Liverpool University to do a degree in Chemistry. I found Organic Chemistry very easy but really struggled with Physical Chemistry, especially spectroscopy. I found it very challenging but something in my personality, my friends call it a defect, has me prefer a challenge over something that it easy. I tend to take on those things that challenge me and push me rather than those things that are easy. So, naturally, I focused on physical chemistry, specifically spectroscopy, and in my final year of my degree did a summer project on NMR and got hooked. From there I went to London University to do my PhD looking at the effects of High Pressure on Lubricant Related Systems by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, funded by Shell Oil. I engineered my own High Pressure Vessel made from non-magnetic titanium to stick into a magnet and apply pressures of up to 5kbar to liquids and look at the molecular dynamics under pressure. I was writing software to analyze the data and fit to specific models. Fun times – engineering, chemistry, computing – the type of diversity I like in a project.
From there I went to Ottawa, Canada to work at the National Research Centre (NRC) labs switching from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to Electron Spin Resonance for about 18 months. It was a great place to work and I truly enjoyed the switch to a new type of spectroscopy. However, NMR definitely had more applications so I switched back to NMR and went to the University of Ottawa to run their NMR Facility, again for about 18 months. Lack of funding and the inability to get new equipment in to run even some of the more mundane modern NMR experiments had me look for other opportunities and move South to the United States to work at Kodak in Rochester as their NMR Technology Leader. There I had the responsibility to set the technology vision for NMR and manage a number of their NMR labs. During that period I was focused on the development of walk-up technologies to provide access to modern analytical technologies in the hands of chemists in a “walk-up” environment delivering robotic control, offline data access and processing and an “analytical LIMS” – a laboratory information management system to track samples, structure and spectra through our lab. We build the first web-based LIMS system, called WIMS (Web-based Information Management System) on Netscape Navigator (remember that?) and got a lot of attention and visits from the LIMS vendors. We developed software systems under the simple adage of “The Web is the Way”…how right we were. That work was done in 1996.
From Fortune 500 America I joined a small start-up chemistry software company called Advanced Chemistry Development. I joined as their product manager for NMR and over the next few years grew the product line into the industry leader for NMR prediction, for third party NMR processing and databasing and, one of the best undertakings of my scientific career, a platform for Computer Assisted Structure Elucidation. I had the opportunity to work with some of the best small molecule NMR jocks in the world, an incredible team of developers and scientists at ACD/Labs and then move my skill set outside of NMR. I managed the development of an entire analytical data management system (ADMS) covering Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Mass Spectrometry, Chromatography, Infrared Spectroscopy and a myriad of other analytical techniques. I managed the structure drawing software, ChemSketch, that has had over a million downloads as it is now freeware, and the nomenclature product line for generating systematic names from structures and converting names to structures. The product lines became so successful that we had to bring in a group of other product managers who could focus on the individual product lines. I became their Chief Science Officer with a major focus on business development but always kept my hands in direct product management, marketing and sales. My passion remained the application of software to data handling, manipulation and delivery to scientists and trying to extract as much information as possible from available data.
A few years ago I floated an idea inside ACD/Labs regarding how it might be possible to index chemical compounds within an organization. Not just ones sitting inside a structure database but those represented in documents, reports, papers, publications, patents and represented by chemical names and structure images. It would require the culmination of multiple technologies including entity extraction techniques to find chemical identifiers, algorithms and look-up dictionaries to convert names to structures and software to convert structure images to structures. The intention was to index inside a central database and provide a tool to structurally index the network. We never moved the project forward because there was too much going on.
A couple of years later I was working extreme hours, focused a lot on sales, marketing and business. While it was fun there was a creative part of me not being exercised and I decided to start a hobby project to stress that particular muscle. I’d been watching what was going on with PubChem and a number of other online databases such as DrugBank. Web technologies had come a long way and I implicitly still believed in the “web is the way”. The concept of spidering an organization’s network had expanded to spidering the internet. Admittedly a major undertaking, a lot of the tools were coming together to allow it to happen. A few of my friends and I got together to create a platform for centrally indexing chemistry on the internet with the intention of linking chemical compounds to related resources on the web. And so ChemSpider was born.
Once ChemSpider went online as a structure searchable database of about 10 million chemicals we expanded the database by adding data from various other data sources, added functionality to query the data in various ways and added various services to allow organizations to tap into the resource we were building. Our target shifted over the next couple of years to one of building a structure centric community for chemists and, as we started to assemble and index the public chemistry on the internet it became clear that there was an enormous quality issue in the majority of the public compound databases we wanted to link too. There were so many errors in these databases it was quite shocking. As we assembled our database we were inheriting these errors and it was clear that we would need to curate these data in both robotic and manual ways. We built a curation platform to allow crowdsourced curation of the data so that users of ChemSpider could help us clean up the data. We added a deposition system for users to deposit their own chemistry and we added a series of tools to allow users to annotate the data and add supplementary information. The database today is almost 25 million unique entities assembled from over 300 data sources. We’ve truly built a community of chemists around ChemSpider with thousands of users coming to the site everyday and with a number of these users curating, annotating and adding data on an ongoing basis.
In June of last year the Royal Society of Chemistry acquired ChemSpider and that is where I am now as the Vice President of Strategic Development.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Our focus remains consistent with the original goal of building a central portal for chemists to facilitate traversing the web to find chemistry related data, information and knowledge. At present we remain focused on linking together structure-based data and resources but will eventually expand this out to chemical compounds that cannot be explicitly defined by a chemical structure table…things such as polymers, minerals and mixtures (coal tar, mineral oil, etc.). We busy building curated disambiguation dictionaries and use them as the basis of chemical name (entity) extraction and recognition so that we can perform semantic markup and linking. We continue to expand the breadth and improve the quality of the data on the database with the intention of being able to query and link to every structure-based database that can be accessed via the internet. Chemists have different personae – there are synthetic chemists, analytical scientists, medicinal chemists, chemistry students and teachers to name just a few. While each of these would want to access different types of data for their work and research a Venn Diagram would provide a specific set of query overlaps – let them search by chemical name, chemical structure/substructure and properties. From there they would layer on different expectations about what to do with the result set. The goal is simple…make the internet structure-searchable and provide interfaces and services to allow chemists to query and use the results.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
One specific area of interest I have right now is to encourage crowdsourced collaboration in chemistry. My bias at present is to present an environment whereby members of the chemistry community can give/share/contribute/educate/enable/improve chemistry on the internet. In our terms this means allowing them to add their data to the ChemSpider database, annotate what’s already online, validate and curate out the junk. By applying their skills and contributing they can build their own professional profile in the community and bring benefit to other chemists. We are intending to layer on recognition and rewards systems and allow chemists to form connection networks of collaboration. We ourselves are already immersed into the network of Open Notebook Science providing access to services and data allowing others to perform their research. One of our areas of focus right now is ChemSpider SyntheticPages, an online database of synthetic procedures built for the community by the community. There is so much chemistry, so many chemical reactions that are performed in labs across the world but the synthetic details and associated analytical data never sees light of day and never gets published. It might make it into a thesis but then that will get put on the supervisors shelf or in a library somewhere. Despite the fact that these can be electronically enabled and discoverable the reality is it hardly happens. If we can get just a fraction of the chemistry community to donate one SyntheticPage a week the database will explode. As it’s a free resource chemists have much to benefit. The challenge is to how to encourage a chemist to invest some of their time in writing up their procedure and putting it online. Contributors to date have commented that if its already in electronic format it might add another 15-30 minutes to their day but the result is public exposure of the work, a permanent record of value to other chemists, a public profile for the submitted (including a digital object identifier for the resume!), and an opportunity to engage the community as they can provide feedback and comments. Everyone wins.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
I don’t blog as much as I used to simply because I don’t have as much time on my hands. When ChemSpider started I was “dragged” into blogging because of some attacks made on ChemSpider made by very vocal members of the blogosphere. I couldn’t figure out how to defuse some of the misinformation and accusations being made about our efforts with ChemSpider except to become a participant in the blogosphere. I found that blogging became a great way for me to engage the ChemSpider users and get their feedback on ideas for improving the service, to communicate new functionality in the system, to express my views of things going on in the community and to generally release creative expression again through writing.
The ChemSpider blog remains a way to communicate what we’re up to in terms of new developments on ChemSpider and other Cheminformatics projects internal to RSC. It also gives me a voice to comment on what’s going on in chemistry that interests me, what’s happening in the world of Open Science and engaging our users in dialog.
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?
Facebook for me, at present, is more of a personal tool in terms of interacting with my friends and family in the UK and around the world. I use Twitter quite regularly (as @ChemSpiderman) and certainly while I am sitting in conferences and seminars. I have found Twitter surprisingly useful, more than I had ever imagined when it first showed up on the scene. My interactions via Friendfeed are certainly useful and I stay connected to certain groups of people on there and stay connected and informed. While each of these takes time it is definitely a net positive, though I would clarify, not a necessity for what I do. I am definitely an advocate for LinkedIn and find the networking aspects of that platform in particular very enabling.
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 first discovered science blogs when I was dragged into the blogosphere by some particularly negative commentaries that were being made about ChemSpider. Lots of judgments, the majority of them not fact-based, were made about what we were trying to achieve with ChemSpider. As they say however, “no press is bad press” and once the fire was lit I entered the blogosphere to respond to the accusations. Without doing so I feel that our reputation would have been very negatively tarnished. It is one of the downsides of the blogosphere unfortunately…people get to say whatever they want, whatever they perceive and, in certain cases have no facts or data to back up their claims. That is when things get very interesting and engaging though!
My Google Reader follows a number of bloggers from my domain. I have a particular appreciation for the insights of Derek Lowe on his “In the Pipeline” blog. I follow Cameron Neylon, Jean-Claude Bradley, Egon Willighagen, Milkshake’s “Org Prep Daily“, Paul Docherty’s “Totally Synthetic” and many others of a similar nature. I had to slim down what was feeding the reader recently as following too many people was becoming overly distracting. I didn’t start following any particular blogs after the ScienceOnline conference but I do watch a lot more people via Twitter now and, when they tweet a post of interest, I navigate over to their blog. Twitter has become another way to link me into blogposts of interest without me overpopulating my reader.
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?
ScienceOnline was fun. I attend a lot of conferences in a year but the energy at ScienceOnline is simply contagious. The level of engagement and contribution far outweighs that I have experienced at any other conference other than the two SciFoo meetings I have attended. Participants at these types of meeting are there to do more than listen. They want to speak…they want to engage and they want to share their opinions. At many conferences there are blocks of time when I am not in sessions. At ScienceOnline there were too many sessions I wanted to sit in on and couldn’t. A much better situation! I walked out of the meeting with new connections, new collaborations and new possibilities. Definitely worth attending.
My one embarrassing moment was when I stood up to do the Lightning (Ignite) Talk at the dinner and hadn’t read the rules of engagement as it were. A pure oversight on my part regarding the flow of the Ignite Talk it actually worked for some strange and unknown reason. Keep the Ignite Talk format next year at the dinner…they were great fun.
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 Emily Fisher from Oceana 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 Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and moved to Washington, DC about three years ago. I’m a writer and editor, not a scientist, but I’ve become more and more interested in science the last few years, which has surprised me. In school, science was always my least favorite subject and the one I did the worst in. The worst grade I ever got in high school was a C in physics, and that was after crying regularly during office hours. As an English major in college, I only took one science class: astronomy, and that was so I could go to UNC’s great planetarium.
I’ve always loved reading, writing and spending time in nature, so I’ve come around to science as an environmentalist. I want to spend my life helping protect the environment through writing and editing, so I’ve come to appreciate that I need to know the science behind what’s happening to the planet – and I’m increasingly curious about it. Scientific thinking doesn’t come easy to me, but maybe that’s also part of its appeal.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My first job out of college was as an assistant editor for a small non-profit publisher that focused mostly on neuroscience. I learned a lot about the brain, though ironically I can’t remember most of it now…
After that I worked for a news aggregator web start-up called Brijit.com. We took long-form journalism (articles from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, etc.) and published 100-word abstracts of the articles. It was like a thinking person’s Digg. It was a tremendously fun atmosphere — there were just a few of us editors, sitting around one big table in a one-room apartment in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of DC. We were churning out around 100 abstracts a day — we had it down to a science, really — and having a great time. We had a really cool thing going, but unfortunately the money ran out.

For the past two years I’ve worked for the ocean conservation organization Oceana as the web editor. I’ve learned so much about the threats facing the ocean, from ocean acidification to shark finning to bottom trawling, and I’ve become an ocean advocate myself.
Twice I’ve gone to the coast of North Carolina (Bald Head Island) to write about sea turtles for our blog and magazine — once I documented sea turtles hatching and once I wrote about nesting mothers. Both were incredible experiences.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
At Oceana, I’m focused on making our website and blog the most readable and engaging place for ocean conservation information. I would love to make us the number one place online for the oceans.
More specifically, right now in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, we are trying to get 500,000 people to sign our petition to Obama and Congress stop new offshore drilling. So far we’ve gotten nearly 33,000 signatures.
I’m also passionate about sustainable food, so in my free time I spend a lot of time at the farmers’ market and trying out new recipes with friends. I also do a lot of yoga and am attempting to learn how to play the guitar.
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?
Blogging is a big part of what I do on a daily basis. I aim to post one blog a day on Oceana’s blog, The Beacon, and sometimes I do more. In the last few weeks, for example, I’ve been posting two, three, four posts a day because of the oil spill. I think a lot of folks at Oceana have recognized what an asset the blog is at a time like this, when we want to react swiftly to the crisis and get our voice out there.
I started our Twitter account last year, and a friend and colleague of mine has pretty much taken it over along with Facebook. She’s doing a great job getting people engaged in our work.
I think blogging and social media are a crucial part of our communications work at Oceana — it’s our primary method of interacting directly with our activist base, or Wavemakers, and hearing their ideas, concerns and questions. Our CEO, Andy Sharpless, is even tweeting now, at @Oceana_Andy.
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?
I really enjoyed finally meeting people that I had online relationships with but never met in person, like Miriam Goldstein and the guys from Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science. I also met some great new people, like the web editor from the New England Aquarium.
At the session about the future of science journalism, I realized that the line between blogger and journalist is truly blurred now. Similarly, at the session about social media from the Pacific Garbage Patch, I was impressed to see how science can be documented using social media tools like blogging and Twitter, even from the middle of the ocean. It was really striking to hear that the journalist’s New York Times story about the garbage patch was less effective and reached fewer people than her personal blog did.
I also really enjoyed the “blog to book” session. It’s my dream to write a book one day, and while a book project itself seems overwhelming, blogging doesn’t. It made a book seem like an achievable goal — some day.
It was so nice to see 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 Amy Freitag 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?
Well, first, the basics: I’m a PhD student at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. My research looks at different types of knowledge relating to water quality out here on the coast and how they do and don’t mesh to form a cohesive, scientifically-based policy to protect our estuarine resources for future generations. My scientific philosophy is a bit different than your standard empiricist, a discussion I and my co-bloggers have had in great detail and in print on the blog. Since humans and their behavior and decisions are a large part of my research, I tend to have a difficult time separating research from activism and have to pay constant attention to my role in my research community, as it extends far beyond just observation. This creates both opportunities and responsibilities.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m interdisciplinary at heart. I never could decide if I’d rather be out talking to people or in the field counting critters. But really, the unifying factor is the observational, exploratory nature of the research, something I’d like to continue. Whether doing interviews or planting data loggers in the intertidal, it’s a field experience – a type of lifestyle where surprises are the norm. You set out with a mission to study one thing and your dissertation ends up being on something completely different that emerged from experiences during the research process. That’s what keeps me ticking – those surprises keep life interesting.
One of my favorite research projects arose from a “study abroad” experience in Alaska Native territory. The motivation initially was to get to Alaska and pay for my adventures by doing fieldwork. A forestry professor hired me to help with a prescribed burn about 45 minutes outside of Fairbanks that he and “the hotshots” from the forest service were planning. My role was to hike out every day for a few weeks and basically map out what the forest looked like pre-burn – size and types of trees, animal paths, type of understory, topography, etc. Fairly basic forestry science, which had been part of my academic history as I had spent a summer as an intern in a sugar maple plantation. However, the summer was a wet one and after I was done with all those measurements, the burn was declared postponed until the following summer. I was offered the opportunity to be a roving field hand and help with any of the projects going on at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) that needed help.
After project-hopping for a few weeks, I was invited to come along to Venetie, a small village of roughly 200 people at the foothills of the Brooks Range in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge that was concerned about their subsistence resources and had asked for research help from an anthropologist at UAF. I flew into town and got the tour, through a dusty general store and around the village, where there were no cars and the town activity for the day was to build a house for a recently married couple who had decided to move back to their hometown to raise their coming child.
The next day we met with the council of elders to discuss research needs and clarify the arrangement of intellectual property between UAF and the tribe. That evening, we went with one of the elders on a moose hunt, modern style – on the back of an ATV with a large rifle that could both spot and shoot across Big Lake. We didn’t see any moose that night, but did take home a duck for dinner. From a couple days’ experience, I became aware of the need for socially relevant research and collaboration with the residents in the area so carefully studied for the ecological literature. The project that resulted for me was a GIS analysis of changing subsistence resources (moose, caribou, berries, waterfowl, timber for wood stoves) under various models of increased fire due to climate change. From that, the tribe could predict which villages were the most vulnerable to resource shortages and plan for either moving them or subsidizing their needs from other villages.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As for a lot of PhD students, most of my time goes towards my research, which is luckily also a passion of mine. I’m very much in planning stages for my life for the next three years, which is both exciting and a little bit nerve-wrecking as well. Part of that is making the friends and contacts I will need in order to get good interviews over the next few years, gaining rapport within the community. That’s often just a fun social science excuse to get out and do fun things 🙂 And hopefully, after my time here is done, I will have “an ethnography of water quality”.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science communication is crucial to both my research and commitment to broader impacts. It’s critical for transfer of knowledge and the collaboration that is necessary for effective policy. Beyond my particular interests, though, I’m often baffled by how many scientific articles are difficult to penetrate even for people who know the lingo. My undergrad advisor once said that if you can’t explain what you do to a fourth grader, taking into account their attention span, you aren’t doing good science. I’ve taken that as a mission in my life and the use of the Web is a great way to reach all the fourth graders out there.
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 find blogging a good way for me to practice and refine my writing and keep my brain grounded in the real world in terms of the jargon I use. It’s a great way to extricate myself from the ivory tower. In addition, I find it super useful to have a blog up and running and respected when the time comes to write broader impacts statements. Through the summer, I will be blogging about my first time on a research cruise on the open ocean and potentially a trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In these cases, it’s both positive and necessary to blog and get immediate feedback. I credit our commenters and my Twitter friends for making me a better scientist.
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 first discovered science blogs through friends, first the Cornell Mushroom Blog and then the one I now write for, Southern Fried Science. To be honest, I was more familiar with the political blogs, especially of the DC area where I grew up. It was a welcome find to discover science blogs and I am still surprised how welcoming the community has been. Like many before me have said, ScienceOnline is a great forum to put a face to a name on a blog and a personality behind the writing. It’s critical to keeping the community going and creating traditions and camaraderie between blogs (from singing sea shanties with the other ocean bloggers to planning Carnival of the Blue and swapping blog stories). I’ve met a number of awesome people just from one year attending ScienceOnline that are all easy to keep in touch with because we’re active over Twitter (like Jeff Ives of the New England Aquarium and Miriam Goldstein of Deep Sea News). These connections will definitely help me both professionally and personally in the future.
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 tweeting of all five parallel sessions by practically everyone in them was a change of conference culture for me, but one I would like to see occur elsewhere. It brought unity to the conference and made one fluid conversation happen as people drifted from session to session. I can’t wait to go back next year!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.