Category Archives: SO’09

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Cameron Neylon from the Science in the open 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My background is in protein chemistry and biochemistry. Broadly speaking what I do is take proteins and use chemical and genetic approaches to change their sequence or modify their characteristics and then use a range of techniques to see what has happened.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
The kid in the toyshop? Rich and famous? Actually no real idea and I’m not sure that it matters that much. The conclusion I’ve come to is that what I want to do is make some sort of difference by applying what I can do well and what I know in whatever the best place is. My background and knowledge is in the biological sciences so that seems a good start but the question is how to make the biggest difference. Over the years this has meant that I have moved from pure science to methods development to working in positions that support other people doing science to thinking about how to make the whole process of science and research work more effectively. To make a big difference doing the straight science you have to do the right thing at the right time – to affect a lot of people it has to be really earth shattering. But as what you do relates to more researchers or more people smaller differences can have bigger effects. If I could do something that improved the efficiency of all research by 0.001% that would be a huge contribution.
So when I grow up I want to be someone who made a difference.
What is your Real Life job?
I’m a senior scientist responsible for biological sciences at the ISIS Neutron Scattering Facility, which is run by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. We provide and large scale facilities for the UK research community. Neutron scattering has traditionally been used mainly in the chemical and physical sciences (particularly in areas of polymer and magnetic structure and magnetic and structural dynamics) but has a lot of potential in solving particular types of structural problems in the biological sciences. My job is an interesting combination of directly supporting users who visit to exploit our facilities, methods development to expand the range of problems we have the expertise to tackle, and public relations and promotion of neutrons to the bioscience community.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The ability to have an ongoing and distributed conversation with smart people regardless of where they are. I believe strongly that we can use the web to find efficiency gains of much more than 0.001% in how we do research by finding the right people to solve the right problems, by distributing the load across geographically separated groups and working more collaboratively. On top of this I find the potential to explain more effectively what science is and what it can and can’t do to the wider community by directly involving them in the research process really exciting. While 2009 will rank as one of the most depressing years on record for public engagement with and understanding of science the potential to do a lot better – and to expand the kind of science we can do at the same time – is there for the taking.
When I look back at the last couple of years the amount of change in both the consumer web and the tools that are being specifically developed for researchers is massive. We’ve been through a big development of social networking sites for scientists which I personally believe haven’t been very successful, mainly losing out the mainstream equivalents, but we’re now seeing a second round of efforts that are learning from some of those mistakes and will be very interesting to watch. I still think there isn’t enough focus on actually solving problems that the majority of researchers know that they actually have – there is still too much building of things that would be cool if people used them, but not giving those people a reason to use them. But I think 2010 will be a very interesting year with lots of new technologies maturing and coming online.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Blogging and Friendfeed in particular are a crucial aspect of the work I do looking at online tools for researchers. That is where the community is and where the most up to the minute conversations are happening with the newest ideas. Twitter is important because so many people are on it, a critical demonstration that its often the community, and not the tool which is important. Tools like Slideshare and Wikis, GoogleDocs and other collaborative services are also important to this work because they really underpin the distributed collaborative approach we are trying to develop and exploit. I think Google Wave will gradually become an important part of this ecosystem over the next 12-18 months as the clients and servers bed down and the hype and backlash cycle dies down enough for people to figure out what tasks it is good for.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I wrote up how I came to get involved with the online blogging community a while back – http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/08/22/how-i-got-into-open-science—a-tale-of-opportunism-and-serendipity/. In terms of the blogs on my blog roll there are many that will be familiar (Deepak Singh’s BBGM, Jean-Claude Bradley’s Usefulchem, John Wilbanks’ Common Knowledge, Neil Saunders’ What you’re doing is rather desperate). I keep an eye on Richard Grant (The Scientist), Jenny Rohn, and Martin Fenner at Nature Network. Some other blogs that may not be as familiar to the regular sciblogger community but are well worth the effort are Greg Wilson’s The Third Bit, Mike Ellis’ Electronic Museum, PT Sefton’s blog and Nico Adams’ Staudinger’s Semantic Molecules.
Blogs that I tracked down and got into my feed reader after last year included Christina’s LIS Rant (now at SciBlogs) and Katherine Haxton’s Endless Possibilities, as well as a wider selection of the more general science blogs, that are you know…actually about science rather than somewhat meta stuff that I do.
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?
What really struck me was both the diversity and the quality of presentations, discussions, and writing. Mostly it pushed me to up my game, which may be one of the reasons I’m posting less…
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Absolutely, I will be there…ah that would be like, this January…in about two weeks…woops!
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Christian Casper to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Christian Casper, and I recently finished a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University, in their program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, in which I focused on online scientific communication. Before that I did an M.A. in English at Eastern Michigan University, with a thesis on the 1996 Nobel lectures in chemistry (the buckyball folks: Smalley, Kroto, and Curl).
I’m also a “recovering chemist” — I did my undergrad at Iowa State University in chemistry, with a minor in biology, and I went to grad school in chemistry at the University of Michigan. I took my M.S. there when I decided that scientists and scientific communication were more interesting than atoms and molecules are!
I worked for a while as a technical writer at a small scientific-instrument company in Ann Arbor called Kaiser Optical Systems Inc. (KOSI for short) that developed components and eventually entire instruments for Raman spectroscopy. Although my primary duties at KOSI were to develop marketing and operations documentation, I also managed our applications laboratory, and I helped clients develop Raman-based applications for their research or their production facility or whatever they happened to be interested in. I enjoyed being able to still get my hands dirty, but I was really finding myself drawn to the study of language and rhetoric, so that’s when I decided to go back to grad school.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I’m not quite sure! I was on the academic job market this past year, and I got a good tenure-track job offer from the English department at a large research university in the Southeast, but my wife was also on the market and we couldn’t find positions together. She had been focused on post-secondary teaching for much longer than I had, so I yielded to her, and we happily moved back to Michigan, where she is now an assistant professor of biology at Eastern Michigan. I’m currently doing the final revisions on my dissertation (I successfully defended in July) and am looking for a position. If anyone out there needs someone with my skill set and is fine with my being in southeast Michigan, feel free to get in touch! I’m interested in consulting, communication, or development work for R&D organizations or higher education.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
In my doctoral work I was interested in how new forms of online communication might enact new genres and how they might alter the existing genre of the research article. I used my work primarily to answer some basic questions in what’s called rhetorical genre theory, particularly regarding the ways that different genres can work together, but I think that people in the sciences might get something out of it too, although that wasn’t my primary audience.
At the conference you led a session about Rhetoric in science, and this is also the topic of your research. How do you see the Web changing the language of scientific communication in both formal and informal venues?
It’s hard to predict too far in the future, but it does seem like we’re moving away from some of the more rigid, formal “rules” of scientific communication. This was happening before the Web really took off, of course. You see a lot more first-person and the active (as opposed to the passive) voice in the scientific literature even in, say, the 1980s than in the 1950s, and those old preferences for passive voice really seem to be disappearing now, except in some more
conservative quarters. Looking at the level of the entire publication unit, it seems like we’re moving toward publishing shorter reports in higher quantities, but obviously there are a lot of factors involved with that beyond just the publication medium — LPUs and things like that. I don’t think the research paper per se is going to go away anytime soon — there just isn’t any selection pressure in that direction — but there are going to be more ways to communicate informally across geographical separations. How exactly that plays out remains to be seen, especially in terms of professional rewards. That’s more of a sociological issue than a rhetorical one, however, so that’s getting out of my expertise!
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I haven’t done much with those, but I do think that if I were to push my dissertation work further I’d want to take those things into account. I think blogs are especially interesting, particularly as a bridge between the professional and public spheres. I’m also interested in seeing how ResearchBlogging.org evolves, because that’s another thing that alters the milieu, if you will, of the research article.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I actually discovered science blogs while trolling for research artifacts for a term paper in one of my doctoral seminars. This would have been in the spring of 2007. I did write a sort of speculative/theoretical paper that provided some of the basis for my later work.
As for favorites, I’m going to say that I enjoy most of the most popular ones, and I’ll name a couple that I think deserve maybe even a bit more attention than they seem to get. I like Tetrapod Zoology, by Darren Naish, very much. In fact, I think that’s the one that really first caught my eye, because it’s really sophisticated on the one hand, but at the same time it’s really accessible. I also really like Built on Facts, with Matt Springer. We need more blogs in the physical sciences, and I like that he doesn’t shy away from equations but that he also does a really nice job of explaining their significance and what they mean. I also like that ScienceBlogs is bringing in some librarians and folks like that as well. We have a really outstanding library staff at NC State, so I’m glad to see that profession get some recognition on ScienceBlogs.
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?
There’s been so much, but I think the session from ScienceOnline09 that has stuck with me is the one on image and sound in scientific publishing. I have some nascent research questions coalescing in that area! I also really enjoyed the one on science blogging and the history of science, but that’s because I personally am very interested in those “x of science” fields — history, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology, and so on.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.
I’m looking forward to making it back down to North Carolina for future conferences! I wish I could do it this year, but with my job situation up in the air I can’t really make the commitment. Hopefully Anne and I can make it back sooner rather than later! Thanks for all you do to make these excellent conferences happen.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Daniel Brown from the Biochemical Soul 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Daniel Brown, and I am a biologoholic.
I grew up as a rat-tail-sporting, barefoot redneck running around the pine forests of Northeastern Texas (specifically in a tiny town called Hooks). My daily pre-teen life apart from school pretty much consisted of me looking for critters alone in the woods – often trekking great distances (for a little kid anyway) through forests and over farmlands, skirting diamondback rattlers, copperheads, and other rednecks. Times were different then, eh? One of my most vivid memories from my childhood was when I came upon a flooded area of “my woods” a week or two after a big storm. The entire forest floor was covered in a couple of inches of water, which was itself filled with gloopy, slimy bunches of frog eggs. Each gelatinous mass was about the size of a softball, and I distinctly remember just sitting their feeling the goo between my fingers as tiny tadpole tails swirled within each isolated egg. I was completely mesmerized. I’m almost certain that I was born a biologist – but that moment in the forest of frog embryos in particular pretty much sealed the deal for me.
I grew out of my redneckdom not long after, though I certainly retained my country boy attitude. Since those days in the Texas woods my biological interests have varied widely. I spent time in my undergrad training (at an amazing liberal arts college called “Hendrix College” in Arkansas) working in the field of ecology, radio-tracking timber rattlesnakes in the Ozark Mountains. In a slightly more sophisticated echo of my days playing with frog eggs, I moved to the University of North Carolina where I worked for many years trying to figure out how genes tell a growing frog embryo how to make a heart (my Ph.D. work). After getting my doctorate, I stayed in the field of developmental biology and spent a few years studying brain development in mice.
I have now gone one step deeper into the realm of biology, moving into the field so cool it gets its own nickname: “evodevo.” For the non-scientists out there, that’s “evolutionary developmental biology.” More on this below…
I am also a graphic artist (mostly digital these days) making both 2D still-lifes and 3D animations, and I’m an avid fossil collector.
Full disclosure: I was recently asked this exact same question by another blogger (The Reef Tank – not posted yet), so some of my above answer is a bit of self-plagiarism. Sue me.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I do not ever want to grow up. That is, I hope to remain the 8-year-old boy trapped in a man’s body that I am until the day I die. That being said, in a fantastical world in which I have become that which I’d most like to be, I would become a full-time biologist/geologist/professor/fossilhunter/novelist/artist/animator/photographer/blogger/sculptor/whittler/musician/gamer. The cruel voice of Real Life has informed me, however, that I am not nearly talented enough to pull off this dream profession. Thus, my more realistic aspiration is to continue what I’ve been doing, which is to be a scientist/professor during the day and after I’m done with the day-time money-making, pick a hobby in the evening, go at it full steam for 1 to 6 months until one of the others beckon more loudly, and then switch.
What is your Real Life job?
Two months ago, I began a new position as a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of Dr. Veronica Hinman in the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in the Arctic tundra Pittsburgh. In my current work, I study not only how genes control an organism’s development, but also how the genetic programs that control development (Gene Regulatory Networks) evolve at the molecular level (e.g. mutational changes in cis-regulatory elements). And not only do I get to work on such a fascinating subject, but I get to do so using those wacky, brainless creatures called “echinoderms” (e.g. starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers).
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am by far most interested in using the web, regardless of the specific medium, to disseminate and educate the general public on the awesomeness of nature and what we can learn about it through science. It sounds cheesy – but it’s something we all know is sorely lacking in America today. It’s sad when “the awesomeness of nature” seems like a laughable phrase. I find myself constantly dismayed by the lack of general fascination with the natural world among children and high school students. From my experience so far, my blogging has attracted a good number of students – but most of them arrive at my site because of some specific research they were doing. I definitely consider it a success if students end up coming to me to learn about specific topics. However, I (like most people/businesses on the web) would most like to discover ways to reach out and pull in people that would otherwise not seek out scientific knowledge. Which ties in with the next question…
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I find that blogging (and following blogs) figures prominently in my own thinking about my work. But beyond that I have yet to find (or rather, create) specific ties to my actual research. This is mostly because I only recently began my new research and have yet to blog about it (in fact I’ve been on quite a blogging hiatus since the summer because of the sheer magnitude of new information and techniques to learn).
However, I consider teaching and outreach to be an integral part of who I am and of my actual work. So in that sense, blogging has been the centerpiece of my attempts to reach out to the public and throw a little science at them.
I used Twitter a lot for a good while – both for discovery of interesting things and promotion of my own – but eventually I found the deluge of interesting information too overwhelming and time-consuming. More importantly for me, I found that my own tweets tended to be drowned out as well, with very few people discovering my posts.
I’ve now found that I’ve had by far the most success in reaching the general public through Facebook. My posts would generally be read by a core group of my own friends (most of which are not scientists), some of which would then repost, etc.
Unfortunately, Real Life has pretty much removed my ability to utilize fully any of the social networks for good science fascination dissemination.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites?
I went through most of graduate school performing actual science while completely oblivious to the existence of science blogs or the science blogging community. I’m not quite sure how that happened.
Then one day I somehow stumbled across (who do you think?) PZ at Pharyngula. Suddenly I was like, “Oh! This exists! I should do this!” Trust me – the exclamation marks were all there. I started blogging near-instantly. I had been putting together dumb little sites with my own rants and thoughts since about 1998, none of which was ever really seen by anyone. The discovery of science blogging really allowed me to find a central way to focus my thoughts and my intentions. By far my favorite blogs are the one you’re reading, Southern Fried Science, Deep-Sea News, The Oyster’s Garter, Cephalopodcast, Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets, The Echinoblog, Observations of a Nerd, and Oh, For the Love of Science!.
This of course perfectly leads into the next question, because…
Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
…I’ve left a bit of the story out. You see, after I discovered science blogs and started blogging, it was only a few months later that I discovered this thing called ScienceOnline09 – and it was being held only 1 mile from my workplace (the NIEHS). It was there that I met the squid-hatted Andrew, crab-hatted Kevin, and merry-making Miriam (and of course Bora!) of four of the aforementioned blogs. Merely meeting all the science bloggers present made me realize “Wow – there’s even more to this thing than I thought. My blog is crap. I gotta fix that. I need to become more of a part of this community.” Reading their blogs over the coming months also aroused my interest in marine biology and at least set me on the path to my current research in echinoderm evodevo. Thus, the contingent nature of life, much like that of evolutionary history, means that my attendance at ScienceOnline09 had a direct causative influence on me sitting in this lab right now surrounded by tubes of starfish DNA.
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 haven’t read everyone else’s interviews, but I can only assume that many have said the same thing – Miss Baker’s biology class and how she used blogging and the internet inside and outside the classroom completely opened my eyes to the possibilities of the Web as a teaching tool. I have no doubt that I will be using some sort of blogging/network medium as a supplement to my future courses.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked my Scibling, Blake Stacey from the Science After Sunclipse 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? For example, what is your Real Life job?
Nominally, I do “complex systems modeling and analysis”, but the projects I work on are hush-hush. It’s all very need-to-know. I could figure out what I’m doing, but then I’d have to kill myself.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
A hammy Shakespearean over-actor. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, and who would have thought the old man to’ve had so much blood in him?
I see from your blog that you wrote a science-fiction novel. What’s that about?
Until Earthset is a tale of forbidden love, murder most foul and artificial intelligence, all set in an alternate 1968. Why I wrote it — well, the compulsion to invent imaginary people and make them suffer is probably just one of those delightful spandrels we’ve inherited, a side effect of our brains thinking in narrative terms. After the fact, I was able to invent several justifications for my hobby. For example, we keep having arguments on the Blogohedron about the relationship between science and art, about how scientific accuracy works in fiction and all that, and it’s nice to have a little practical experience in the matter. To a stuffy audience, I could sell my novel as a 130,000-word thesis on The Two Cultures Question (TM), but really, it’s a murder mystery with robots.
Do you think science fiction has an obligation to be scientifically accurate?
Well, let’s break that down a bit. “Science” is (a) a community of people using (b) a set of methods and tools to build (c) a body of knowledge which sometimes (d) gets applied to make technology. If the characters in your story investigate something wholly fictitious, like an alien monolith, using the practices which real scientists would actually employ, are you being “accurate”? Even stories not expressly written to be didactic build up our mental image of the world. Now, you could try to use fiction in an “educational” way to convey the facts of science, to transmit the data about our discoveries, but you can also use it to illuminate the methods of the trade and the social mores of the profession. Think of a novel like Contact — or, to pick an extreme example, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The scientific knowledge base of the story is fanciful, but the travails of the characters do call to mind issues about science as a profession, such as the ways people (and women in particular) have had to balance career and family. Art is generally better at raising questions than providing answers. If you’re looking for hard data in fiction, if you want to find the blueprint for a perfect society in a made-up story, well, peace be with you in your quest. But that’s only half the picture. In the age of Open Access and Google Scholar, we can dig up any particular datum we need, if we know how to look; the challenge is having a clue on how to start, and knowing how to handle what we bring back. The former requires an understanding of the broad strokes of scientific knowledge, and the latter depends on good critical thinking skills. A science education has to teach both, to have any worth at all, and science fiction can help us explore science-as-method even though we’ve yet to dig up that monolith in Tycho crater.
At ScienceOline’09, Henry Gee argued that creating science fiction requires the same kind of imagination as doing science, because both start with inventing hypotheses about the world and then exploring what they would entail.
Yes, I’d say there’s a great deal of truth in that. In science, hypotheses survive when they mesh well with the data, whereas in SF, the conjectures which endure are the ones which make for good stories. (Our understanding of the strong nuclear force has advanced quite a bit since 1972, but Asimov’s The Gods Themselves hardly suffers for having arrived before quantum chromodynamics!) There’s this notion afoot that if a scientist doesn’t like a movie which has some science-talk in it, this has to be because the science was bad! This is rather like saying the only reason a plumber can dislike a movie is because it doesn’t show anybody using the bathroom. Now, I don’t want to make a blanket statement here, but I do know a few science people, and from what I’ve seen, they’re plenty willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a story — except when the story itself isn’t good enough to suspend disbelief for!
With one book down, where will you go next?
I’m taking a stab at mathematics education, partly spurred by my own unhappy memories of high-school mathematics classes, which in retrospect turned out to be four years of almost wholly wasted time. Coming from someone who went on to get a physics degree, that’s pretty harsh! I happily deal with abstruse mathematics every working day, but you couldn’t pay me to sit through Pre-Calculus again, so something must be off here.
And you’ll be speaking on mathematics education at ScienceOnline’10?
With Maria Droujkova, yes. For all I know, we’ll be demonstrating our spiffy computer graphics to an empty room, because we’ll be scheduled at the same time as some “civility in communication” session, to which everybody will go so they can argue at each other about how best to be a nice person.
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?
Finally meeting Brian Switek of Laelaps and Dr. SkySkull of Skulls in the Stars was fun, because we share enthusiasms even though we work in different fields — Brian and I have gotten righteously steamed over “textbook cardboard”, for example, which he finds in palaeontology and I in physics. But you asked if anything changed my views, which isn’t the same as reaffirming them. That’s more difficult to say. I can tell you, though, that meeting Stacy Baker’s high-school students was a blast: I skipped out on the sessions of the last day to chat with them instead. They provided the questions, I tried to bring the answers. If anything at the conference changed the way I think about the biz, it was that conversation. When you meet the people who are poised to benefit the most from good science communication, the quarrels you used to have on the Blogohedron look downright silly.
It was so nice to finally meet you and thank you for the interview. I am looking forward to seeing you again next January.
Likewise. Thank you very much for the opportunity to ramble.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Thank you, Bora
I am a lucky individual who was given a chance to exist, create and interact with other living beings on this amazing planet. It is hard to put this into right words. Those who know me, know that I was shocked to find out the extent of the Bible Belt grip here in NC, and again, I can not help but have immense respect toward Nature and be as humble as our human existence allows. Dusko Radovic said once (I know there are plenty of ex-Yugoslav readers here, thus both original quote and translation): »Mi smo mrve na Zemlji, Zemlja je mrva u kosmosu. To se moze razumeti sve dok nas ne zaboli zub. Mrvine mrve mrva…« »We are crumbs on Earth, Earth is a crumb in the Universe. All that is easy to comprehend until we have a toothache. Crumb in the crumbs crumb«
So, yes, I was lucky to be born in a wonderful country that used to be, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Belgrade. Lucky to be surrounded with amazing people who did good, one way or another. Ones who were kind and respectful to show me how to act, and the opposite ones, to show me how not to act and how to avoid the traps. For both of them one big thank you.
Part of why I consider myself lucky is to be able to study biology, and some 24 years ago University of Belgrade had really extensive curricula. Today, according to Bologna accords, BSc in Biology at University of Belgrade is equal to an MSc elsewhere, but when I graduated Serbia was still not part of the Bologna process. I worked for eight years at the Ecology Department at Institute for Biological Research on predator-prey relationships, small mammal identification and mostly owl research. Thus my full name doesn’t ring much bells, as Tanja Sova does: ‘sova’ means an owl, and that was the word people associated with me so often, it became my pseudonym.
When I moved to USA, Arizona at first and two years ago to North Carolina, I developed a line of artwork inspired by nature. Discovering Etsy helped a lot in many ways, but that is a story for some other interview.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Growing up??? You are kidding! Why would I?
Oh, well… Since I went into adulthood, I was provided with tools to play seriously. You know, when we were young, it was digging around and taking care of pets that was considered play. With a degree, you just turned that play into some serious job. Now I play, I mean create artwork, and I love it. Yes, giving and sharing knowledge / skills is my ultimate wish what I want to do when I grow more gray, I mean when I grow up 😉
What is your Real Life job?
In economy like this, and we’ve been trained that very well back in Yugoslavia / Serbia, one has to be like a cat: to get on its feet. I am open for possibilities, but for now I am self employed making mostly custom orders on Etsy.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Biologist in me is active, although in the background for a while. Bringing the missing pieces into the puzzle of personal and professional knowledge, as well providing inspiration for art. As a parent, I enjoy sharing links with my children and discussing them. Sometimes I am too busy to be able to read all I would want to, so the most active blog reader in the family, Djordje comes with his opinion and it develops most of the time into a discussion either when we craft something together or when we are on the road.
When and how did you discover science blogs? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
It’s all your fault J OK, jokes apart, when we knew we were moving to NC, I googled information that I considered important to learn where am I moving to (SC and VA were options as well), and just came upon your blog. WOW! The new world opened. The amount of time I spend there really depends on available time I have, which is unpredictable. However, sometimes there are some hot topics that steal me from artwork and grab my full attention following the links. I was really, really glad to be able to meet in person many people whose blogs I have read. Irreplaceable experience which I am looking forward repeating. It was discovering many very cool people first of all, and learning about new blogs as well.
When did you become an artist? How do you combine your interests in science and art?
I would rather say that just like this figure was more of a freeing the captured sculpture from within, the same is with artist in us: circumstances make the artist surface from within, with each artwork it is more prominent. Whenever I can, I do my best to combine science and art. I’ve learned long time ago that having strong imagination helps understanding natural sciences, and understanding science brings vast amount of art themes to create. I really enjoy Etsy for although you can find ANYTHING there, it has somehow enough numbers of free thinking and highly educated people, many biologist themselves amongst sellers, who apply science knowledge / theme / process / subject into their art. Again, being popular amongst scientists and students, Etsy is helping in widening the public for really specific subjects that otherwise would not have as much appreciation in general public. Examples for such an artwork is this pendant that you can see here. The NYTimes article brought some amazing people, such as Leslie Vosshall, with whom I worked on pendants I am sure not many people from general public would appreciate or understand: Drossophila melanogaster and Aedes aegypti. Learning more about her and her work was even greater joy.
You led two sessions at the conference – one about producing Art for a blog, and the other about Open Access in developing countries. How did they go and what did you learn from them?
Meeting Glendon Mellow was a joy even before we met in person. There are so many interests we have in common and I love his visions of science. Luckily the format of unconference was really good, as you have on-the-spot exchanging and sharing information. I am hoping we tackled some strings and definitely know that there were dozens of tips shown that are more, in my opinion, technical information rather than art itself. However, all those tips are enhancing blogging. Lot of laughter, some quite unintentional but very welcome, as a result of miscommunication between Betul and Djordje 🙂
Danica and I are coming from two different angles and I believe we have opened some questions and definitely paved the way to the upcoming 2010 session with Jelka Crnobrnja-Isailovic. I think session with Danica was also good example of how it is important to have people with different backgrounds in the library systems. Even in biology itself, I recall often a block to understanding between ecologists and molecular biologists, for instance. Demands of publishing at the same rate with laboratory experiments versus field work that needs to have few seasons before showing proper results worth publishing simply does not add up. That is one of the topics for upcoming session as well.
Jelka and I are not only colleagues, but first of all friends, and I am sure this will reflect in a fluid and relaxed session at the unconference in January.
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, your art, blog-reading and perhaps blog-writing?
I wish a day had more than 24 hours (48 would do just fine) for all I would want to do. It was so refreshing being again amongst scientists and some new kids on the block (Balasevicevi ‘neki novi klinci’). I have learned a lot as a parent (at that time homeschooling Djordje), as a biologist to pass tricks and tips to my fellow biologists in Serbia, both who are in education and research, and to understand first-hand the American way of approaching problems I could only read about. Talking in person helps a lot, really. It is hard to stress who would stand out, for there are many, really, and placing the names I would not feel good for the others (say I will mention trilobite, tulumbe, vole dance, discussion about religion just to mention a few topics without mentioning the names), but I really have to say I was blown away with Ms Stacey’s students! As my owns kids are similar age, I was honored to meet them, and quite a few young ladies and gentlemen impressed me the most with their knowledge, dignity, eloquence and mannerisms. My kudos to them. About my blog: have opened one, but still short in time to write. Hopefully in the future.
It was so nice to meet you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
I am looking forward being part of the conference again. Thank you and Anton for incredible amount of time and energy to organize these truly important events!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Arikia Millikan, the former Overlord here at Scienceblogs.com, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
First and foremost, I consider myself a scientist, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. I studied the “hard sciences” throughout my education and scientific principles govern my outlook on the world. But my lab bench is my laptop and I mostly conduct observational studies on the way people use the Web to communicate.
I do experiments, too. I spent about eight months “Cat Herding” at ScienceBlogs, and that was a pretty major experiment. The variables were ideas as well as “physical” changes to the appearance and functionality of the network. Tweak this, upgrade that, measure the changes with analytics and user responses, update methods accordingly. Way better than the lab-coat variety, IMO, because while conducting my experiments, I got to play with awesome scientists online.
I’m also a communicator. I began my undergraduate studies in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. The first week of classes, we were instructed to forget everything we ever learned about writing, because we were only going to perform “technical writing” from there on out. I didn’t like that. I remember thinking, “Science is hard enough for most people to understand, why would anyone purposely create a whole new language to further obfuscate the concepts, making it more abstract to the people who will eventually use products created by science?” So I got what I could from the program, which mostly was an ass-kicking in calc-based physics (but also a solid foundation in the fundamentals of computer programming), and my junior year I changed my major to psychology and joined the student newspaper. There I started the science beat and reported on scientific accomplishments and their societal implications.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I want to be someone who, in the future when people look back at the evolution of the Internet, they’ll say, “Arikia Millikan played an important part in how awesome this is today.” I’d also like – and this is my total pipe dream goal — to write a tech column for Wired. It’s the one publication I subscribe to in print and I read it cover-to-cover every month.
Most importantly, I want to be someone who never stops learning about and benefiting from technology. I am not going to be the old curmudgeon musing about what new technologies the young whippersnappers are in a frenzy about at any given moment. I think that, in the process of learning, some people acquire mental blocks where they think they can’t learn new things, and this can be a very damaging state of mind. I’m 22 right now and I think I’m pretty quick to use and adapt to new gadgets, computer programs, and Web features as they emerge. But I want to be just as adept when I’m 72, Moore’s Law be damned.
What is your Real Life job?
I’m funemployed! I have an assortment of freelance jobs and gigs that keep me mentally occupied and sustain my existence in New York City. The project I’m the most excited about right now is that I’m working with Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, as his research assistant. He’s in the process of writing a book about statistical predictions and there’s a large focus on science. So basically, I get to travel around the country accompanying him on interviews with the most awesome scientists I can find. Besides that, I build websites, I have a handful of top-secret projects I work on sporadically with some really talented people in Brooklyn, and I write things occasionally. Working with Nate, I’ve realized that I’d like to write a lot more. I’ve always been someone who has a lot to say, but sometimes it’s hard to say it when you’re constantly in the presence of scientific greatness. It’s like, who am I to write on a topic when there are tons of people already doing it way better than I ever could? I guess it’s kind of a lame excuse. I’ll try to try more and see what happens.
Oh, and I pick up shifts here and there at The Internet Garage, a grungy public computer lab in Williamsburg, the hipster sector of Brooklyn. I provide Internet and technical support for customers and help them use the equipment here, all of which is either crappy or broken. It’s a pretty hilarious place. Most people think it’s a drug front. I assure you that it’s not, though the owners don’t seem to be remotely concerned with turning a profit. I kind of want to write a screenplay about the IG someday.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Well, it’s the field of communication via the use of the Web as a science that interests me the most. The fact that the topic of conversation in the networks I study is science is just a bonus, really. On a recent trip to MIT with Nate, we met Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He talked to us about the emergent field of Web Science and drew us a circular flow chart that I’m going to frame and mount on my wall. Web Science is different than Computer Science in that it takes human behavior online into account and examines the way our behavior shapes the development of the Web itself. That’s the stuff that really gets me going. I want to know everything there is to know about this field.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Blogging and social networking tools are the subject of my work. They enable the individual to simultaneously be consumers of content and providers, and that’s a really powerful concept. I don’t blog too much myself, though I do use all of the above social networking tools on a daily basis. My primary use of them is personal, but it blurs with the professional. I don’t think the two necessarily have to be separate, and I think with the way voluntary information sharing is heading, it will soon be impossible to keep them separate. I think a lot of people are adamant about using sites like Twitter to enhance their professional careers and propagate their viewpoints, and that’s awesome. But I’m 22 and living in the craziest city in the world. Sometimes a girl just needs to Tweet about a guy she just saw with full-face tattoos or a gambling adventure in a speakeasy bar. The question Twitter begs to know is “What are you doing?” after all.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
To be honest, I discovered them when the magazine intern position I applied for with Seed Media Group was filled, but they had an opening with this thing called “ScienceBlogs”. The first time I looked at the ScienceBlogs homepage, I had no idea what it was all about, and this turned out to be a large source of motivation in my work there. I figured that if I couldn’t tell what the deal with the site was or intuitively access the best and most relevant content, most other people couldn’t either. So I accepted the internship and set out to try to make ScienceBlogs better. In that process, I discovered that there was a more effective way for me to further scientific communication than by directly doing the communicating. And now I hope to make that my career.
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?
Attending ScienceOnline 2009 showed me that, though the Internet is a big, mysterious place where there are tons of opportunities for deception, people are generally who you would expect them to be. To “know” someone online, and then meet them in real life, you get insight into layers of one’s personality that, in the past, you may not have had access to. It makes just as much sense sometimes that a person has the exact opposite temperament online that they do IRL, than if their online and offline personalities are one and the same. Attending ScienceOnline last year reinforced the human component of what I do. Because, though it is about traffic and numbers and economics, the best part is knowing that you’re helping someone achieve his or her goals of science communication.
Thank you so much. See you again in January at ScienceOnline2010!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked John Wilbanks from the Common Knowledge 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m John Wilbanks.
I abandoned a biology degree about six months into my university education, in favor of philosophy and languages. I’ve got some informal experience in molecular biology and genetics. I floundered into bioinformatics by accident about ten years ago. Turns out that the philosophy work in epistemology and semantics has at least some utility in the computer world.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I’d love to be a professor, but I’d probably have to go get more letters after my name to make that happen.
What is your Real Life job?
I am the VP for Science at Creative Commons. As part of that, I direct the Science Commons project at CC.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
This question has forced me to write an entire blog post devoted to it. I’ll be posting it later today, hopefully. Edit: Here it is!
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I blog intermittently, and I get some responses from it. I think I’m too intermittent and too verbose when I post for it to be a real conversation. But it’s been a constant surprise to realize that people actually read it.
For me it’s a place to vent. I learn by talking. So I also learn by blogging. The ideas take shape as I try to frame them, and I often look at something after it’s on paper and feel a real sense of discovery. It’s also a more informal place to get my thoughts out – someplace I can speak for myself more freely than as the John-who-works-at-Creative-Commons.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I didn’t really start reading blogs regularly til 2004 or so. Once I got over the activation potential and got a good feed aggregator going, it was all over. I actually got started with the Corante blogs – Copyfight and In the Pipeline, in particular. ITP remains one of my favorite blogs of any stripe. Derek Lowe should be required reading for anyone who thinks drug discovery is easy or that IPRs are the reason drug discovery is hard. Drug discovery is hard because making drugs bend to your will and then work in real human bodies is fiendishly hard, and reading the daily logs of a working medicinal chemist brings that point home in a visceral way.
I track a lot of stuff via the Nature Network Boston site also. They come in through a common RSS feed so I don’t even think of them as separate blogs. I read The Loom. Brain Waves. All My Faults Are Stress Related. I read Dorothea Salo when she was at Caveat Lector, and again at the Book of Trogool.
I discovered Danica Radovanovic at the conference, and read her Digital Serendipities.
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 was sadly only really there for a few minutes. The conference fell during a time of extreme travel. But it did bring home for me how varied the blogging culture is in the sciences – I lost some preconceptions I had about the real potential of blogs to change the system.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Victor Henning from Mendeley to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born in Hamburg/Germany in 1980, moved to London in January 2008, and as a direct consequence, have discovered my love for Marmite and the BBC. In between, I’ve dabbled in a great number of different things. When I was 16, I dreamed of having my own record label, so I worked for Sony Music in Berlin and Revelation Records in Huntington Beach. I then studied for a business degree in Koblenz, Brussels, and Oslo. I decided two switch my life ambition to producing films and worked in a film production company in Munich.
In 2002, while a student in Oslo, I authored my first academic paper on European Film Funding Policy for a journal called Media, Culture & Society, realizing that I enjoyed doing research quite a bit. I enrolled for a Ph.D. at the Bauhaus-University of Weimar, where I could participate in producing short films and co-organized a film lecture series called Guru*Talk that was recently published in book format.
Ultimately, however, my Ph.D. – which I hope to finish this year – is mostly about decision-making in the context of hedonic consumption: Intertemporal choice, ethical/illegal choice, and emotional versus cognitive choice.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I do have a few unfulfilled adolescent rock star ambitions. When I was 15, I thought playing bass guitar in a Nirvana/Soundgarden/Pearl Jam tribute band would surely get me a girlfriend – it did not. Perhaps that was to do with the fact that I wore a Klingon Empire hoodie, nerd glasses, and was a card-carrying member (literally) of the European Star Wars Fan Club. So I’d love to play in a band again, and I’d love to write and produce films. I don’t know whether that counts as growing up or regressing, really.
What is your Real Life job?
I’m involved in Mendeley full-time. My job is mainly to develop the product roadmap, which involves bescribbling many pieces of paper, writing a lot of specs, throwing colored foam balls at headphone-wearing engineers to get their attention, attending conferences like yours, and helping to organize the European counterpart, Science Online London.
Tell us more about Mendeley – what it is, how it works, how did you get the idea to develop it?
As a Ph.D. student, I was downloading hundreds of papers I needed to read – but storing, indexing, sorting, and referencing them was about as much fun as getting punched in the face repeatedly. My friends Jan and Paul (fellow Ph.D. students and researchers) felt the same. We thought: Why isn’t there a software into which we can just drag & drop PDFs, and it then automatically extracts the bibliographic data, the keywords, the cited references, and makes the full-text searchable?
That was the initial idea: Create a desktop-based bibliography tool that automates the tedious tasks as much as possible. But we also realized that, if you connected all these individual bibliography databases through a web interface, you could add interesting networking and collaboration features as well.
So first and foremost, Mendeley is a free bibliography management software that’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It auto-extracts data from your PDF collection, retrieves additional information from CrossRef, PubMed, arXiv, and Google Scholar, and creates a searchable reference database. You can read, highlight and annotate PDFs in the internal PDF reader, and you can create bibliographies using Word/OpenOffice plugins.

In addition to that, you also get an online account on Mendeley.com that lets you sync your library with multiple other computers or to the cloud. This way, you can manage your papers online, or import documents from external databases using a browser bookmarklet – besides PLoS, we currently support 25 other research databases. Finally, you can set Mendeley to sync with your CiteULike library and (in the next release) your Zotero library. Here is the full list of bibliography management features.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think what excites me most is the potential to add a social layer of discovery and impact measurement. The analogy I always use is Last.fm, the world’s largest “social music service”. Last.fm tracks which music you listen to on your computer, iPhone, iPod etc., then creates a personalized radio station for you. In addition, you can access listening statistics for pretty much every single genre, band, or song on earth – for example, here is the page for my favourite band, The Robocop Kraus.
We want to achieve for research what Last.fm did for music. We are creating anonymized real-time readership stats for every single paper, journal, and author – of course, these will get better the more users we have. Of note, PLoS ONE is doing quite well in these stats, as Pete Binfield pointed out a while ago 🙂

We’re also working on recommendations – based on your existing library, which other papers might be interesting for you? And also, as an opt-in feature, which other academics have research interests that are similar to yours?
I recently gave a talk about these issues at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam – here’s the video:

Link:

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
It’s tremendously important. We use the Mendeley Research Blog to give our users a glimpse behind the scenes of a start-up, as well as to get their input on new features and releases. We also share our views on life in academia, science on the web, or – more recently – the future of scientific publishing. Both FriendFeed and Twitter are great to connect with people who think about these issues. Lastly, it’s a very effective support channel: Whenever people ask questions about (or report problems with) Mendeley, we can respond in minutes and try to help them out.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I can’t really remember a conscious moment when I discovered science blogs. I’ve always been reading lots of non-fiction and science-related books, so stumbling upon science blogs was a natural progression. My favourites – in terms of the science they discuss – are Vaughan Bell’s Mind Hacks and Mo Costandi’s Neurophilosophy. As for insights into the future of science online, I really like Cameron Neylon’s Science in the open and Michael Nielsen’s blog.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
There’s pretty good chance you will – looking forward to meeting again!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Danielle Lee from the Urban Science Adventures! © 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I am Danielle Lee and I am a biologist. Specifically, I study animal behavior from an ecological point of view. I am also African-American, which in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting, but matters in the sense that less than 3% of the PhDs awarded to scientists are held by persons of color. The likelihood of meeting a Black scientists is still uncommon, so I often look at the field of science as not only an interesting field of study, but also one aiming to become more diverse.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
An outreach scientist – great title, but the job description changes often. Sometimes this title refers to an academic position responsible for coordinate broader impact projects for a department. I would coordinate undergraduate research efforts as well as coordinate public outreach programs for researchers and students. I would help them prepare for public presentations to facilitate activities that would engage the general public such as hosting science expeditions or summer science camps for youth and their educators.
I really enjoy how informal science programs, such as those offered by museums and science-related agencies participate in public education efforts. I think there is an overwhelming need to dedicate outreach resources to under-served communities, such as minority communities, immigrant communities, and inner-city/rural communities. Mobile learning labs, citizen-science projects, and scientists and students doing hands-on community service can go a long way in enhancing public perception of science and efforts to attract talented people to the field.
Related to this idea of outreach to under-served communities, what I would REALLY love to do is
produce and host a science television program about urban ecology and nature appreciation in cities that specifically targets young urban kids as an audience. As popular as nature shows are, I have never known one that has had an African-American host or a female host or that routinely features a person of color as the science expert. Plus, urban television markets don’t have enough education programming in my opinion and a science show like this might be appealing to their audiences.
What is your Real Life job?
Right now my job is writing my dissertation, which includes analyzing data and interpreting data, and editing manuscripts for my committee to review. I am not compensated for this activity and I am not teaching labs for the university because I want to put all of my attentions into preparing for my defense. When I am done I feel optimistic that I will secure a teaching position or a post-doc fellowship that gets me even closer to one of those dream occupations listed above.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Blogging was my first online communication and still is my favorite. I like the ease-of use and simple formats that websites and blog sites offer. You can find information relatively easy, tabs and tags are used to organize information, you click and there you are. What I like about blogs, specifically is that readers can comment and interact with me and each other. It creates a conversation of the information which mimics real-life teaching except the interaction happens over time and geographic space.
If leverage properly, the web is a great way for me, and scientists in general, to interact with the public in a direct and informal way. Readers, ho might be school kids or curious adults, can simply ask a question and hold a conversation with a scientist. What other medium offers that kind of one-on-one access? None, not even our great informal science programs at museums or state conservation/wildlife departments.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
It can be hard to reconcile my attentions – blogging and doing primary science work – such as doing my research projects and writing up the results. As often as I can, I try to share what I am doing on the blog. I find it personally rewarding and I justify my efforts as meeting broader impact goals. I am sharing science – the culture and ethos of science – with people. I imagine it all matters because too few people (that I know who aren’t scientists or academics) truly understand what science is or how to appreciate nature and my blog guides them.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
For a long time, I was unaware of other science blogs until I discovered scienceblog.com – which is a community of independent bloggers who can post original content or cross-posts entries from other blogs. I simply wanted an outlet and a way to interact with other people. I cross posted some of my posts there for a while. Soon after than discovery, I attended a workshop at a science meeting, Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2006 I think – in Phoenix. There was a workshop about science blogs featuring two science bloggers, and one of them was GrrlScientist. It was then that I learned that there was a scienceblogs.com and it was nothing like the other site. It was great finding this one-stop location for all science blogs.
Some of my favorite science blogs include:
Science To Life by Karen Venti – I was so excited to discover I was not the only Black female science blogger in the universe
Scientist, Interrupted, – I love her photos and quizzes
A Blog Around the Clock – I just love your vibe, so kind, so patient and informative. I think of you as the Papa Smurf of ScienceBlogs- yeah there are some smurfs in the village who aren’t that easy to like but you seem so accepting of them all.
Isis – so straightforward and witty
The Oyster’s Garter
Since the conference I have started reading Thus Spake Zuska, Greg Laden, ScienceWomen, The Fairer Science, Southern Fried Scientist and Deep Sea News – marine bloggers are so funny!
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?
A lot of small things that add up. In general I appreciate the importance of science communication and I am a strong advocate for science sharing – whether it be a scientist, a student, a university media officer or a science journalist. Science news and information is too important and there are still too few science communicators. The public needs these outlets, whether they know it/appreciate it or not. Plus, the more traditional science culture is not addressing these needs. So I continue to promote science blogging (and science communication) to the two most disjunct and seemingly under-served audiences I know: 1) the African-American community and 2) Academic Scientists.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Erin Cline Davis of 23andMe to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m Erin Cline Davis. I grew up in southern California, then headed east for college at MIT. I liked it, but those winters are killer, so I returned to sunny CA for grad school at Stanford. I got my PhD in Molecular and Cellular Physiology in 2006. My thesis work was in James Nelson’s lab. In general, the group studies epithelial polarity and adhesion. That’s what I meant to study. But I ended up working on all sorts of random stuff as I tried to understand the role of Par 6, a protein that has been implicated in the establishment of polarity in multiple species, in the nucleus. After finally becoming Dr. Erin, I decided to make a change and become a science writer. Just a few days after my defense I headed down to the L.A. Times as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow. After that, I landed at 23andMe.
What is your Real Life job?
I’m a science writer for 23andMe, a personal genomics service.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
In addition to creating content for the 23andMe website, I write for our corporate blog, The Spittoon (get it?). It’s really satisfying to be able to help our customers see how their data fits in with the very latest in genetics research. At this point I don’t have my own personal blog, but I would like to in the future if I can ever find the time.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I started reading science blogs once I became a blogger myself. I read Genetic Future a lot. Everyone at the conference had such cool blogs, but one of my favorite finds was Miriam Goldstein’s The Oyster’s Garter. She is so smart and funny! It’s great that she’s on DoubleX too.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Bjoern Brembs to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you?What is your (scientific) background?
As a boy, I was always out and about chasing and catching animals. I’ve been fascinated by watching animals behave and at the time the best way to do this seemed to catch them: frogs, toads, snakes, mice, insects – whatever seemed exciting at the moment was caught, put in a terrarium or other suitable container and observed, only to be released again after some time.
Later, I started reading Konrad Lorenz and other ethologists. I liked their books so much that I started reading other scientists’ books, other biologists like Richard Dawkins, John Eccles or Rupert Riedl, but also physicists like Steven Weinberg or philosophers like Karl Popper or Paul Feyerabend.
I had so much fun with science that it was clear I wanted to study science, in particular biology. Initially, I was fascinated by developmental biology. How can a uniform egg develop into something a lot more complex? Then I attended a lecture by Martin Heisenberg (the youngest son of the uncertainty principle discoverer) on the brain and I was hooked. Heisenberg became also my PhD advisor. Because it makes no sense to try and study behavior without understanding the context in which it is used, I also
specialized in evolution and ecology and have published in both fields before I went into neuroscience full time.
The brain is what makes us who we are. Its main function is to chose from all the different options which behavior to produce next, and nobody knows how it does that. In fact, we know so little about brains that we don’t even know how the brain of a fruit fly works. More astonishing still, we’ve had the ‘connectome’ (all the synaptic connections between all neurons) of the nematode worm C. elegans for over 20 years and still we don’t know what it is that makes a brain out of these 302 neurons and their connections.
When we understand these simpler brains, we’ll have the tools and principles at hand to start and try to understand more
complex brains.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
People grow up? I’m not growing up, it’s only that my body doesn’t seem to agree with me. 🙂
One of my life’s goals is to still be doing giant swings on high-bar when I’m over 70, just like my club-mate and multiple German National Champion in his age class Ernst-Jürgen Bever.
What is your Real Life job?
As you may have guessed from my bio, I’m a neurobiologist. As I find the brains of vertebrates to be too complex and daunting for the level of understanding I aim for, I study the brains of invertebrates, which also offer a much richer toolbox for biological study.
My specialization is in learning (and memory), in particular the kind of learning that takes place when animals learn from the consequences of their behavior, i.e. operant learning.
I’ve written a short summary of my most recent research at The Naked Scientists.
My website contains more details about my work than you would ever want to know:
In January, you co-moderated two sessions: one was the introduction to Open Access, and the other imagining a world after Impact Factor. How are the two – growth of Open Access and demise of Impact Factor – related to each other? What has to happen first?
Newly founded OA journals cannot compete with established journals because they don’t have an IF. Scientists are reluctant to publish in journals without the prestige that a high IF brings. In these terms, the IF needs to go before OA journals can strive.
In what aspects can the web change science communication?
The way scientists communicate their findings today is fundamentally broken and I sometimes have the impression it even is FUBAR.
Who or what broke the system? We, the scientists. We multiplied and multiplied until the present day where we publish between one and two million peer-reviewed papers every year in about 25,000 scholarly journals. It is my understanding, even though I haven’t been around at the time, that this became an issue already in the 1960s: the journals had multiplied with the researchers and so had subscription costs – the IF was invented to be able to rank the journals. Libraries, among others, used this rank to help decide which journals to subscribe to. This journal rank has been in place until now, with the added complication that now scientists themselves use the IF to rank other scientists. Today, high IF means prestige, so scientists will often tend to try and publish their best results in journals with a high IF – a self-stabilizing system.
Poof! In comes the internet and all of a sudden one could in principle place all the scholarly articles that have ever been published on a single computer for everybody to read, text-mine, whatever. No more need for journals. Yet, because of the self-stabilization, we’re still essentially stuck with a publication system that we had apparently already outgrown by the 1960s! Given the growth rate of the modern, data-intensive scientific enterprise, it doesn’t take an Einstein to realize that a heavily patched-up communication system that was already outdated 50 years ago isn’t really the most effective way to do business. Thus, the advent of the web questioned our entire way of doing science – it doesn’t get any more fundamental than that.
It’s always easy to criticize – what solutions does the web offer for science communication?
I could paraphrase an infamous politician and say that you don’t communicate in the system you want but in the system you have – but that’s what politicians and publishers say. I have several dreams for how the web can improve scientific communication.
One of my favorite ones at the moment doesn’t have any journals at all in it. It only needs a federated standard for multi-level peer-review. The first level is among cooperating or competing colleagues in the same field. As data is being collected, it is made public to an ever wider audience: first other graduate students, post-docs in the lab, then lab-head, then cooperating colleagues, then other scientists, still within the same field. This is similar to lab meetings and conferences, but online and all the time. Scientists have always self-organized themselves into societies, clubs and other groups, this is the same principle. These interactions make sure that whatever is submitted for formal peer-review has already passed informal peer-review (and there would be a record of it).
Once the data form a large enough body to be communicated with scientists who are not in this field (or the public), a ‘paper’ will be drafted and submitted for formal peer-review. Reviewers will be both experts in the field but also outsiders, to ensure general readability. These ‘papers’ are then ‘published’ in a distributed database, hosted by the institutions’ libraries, according to the
abovementioned federated standard, linking to the record of data collection and peer-review established in the process of the research.
This is only one of many potential ways in which the web could revolutionize scientific communication while ensuring track records, allowing open access to text, data and methods, providing a reputation system for each contribution of each scientist. There are many more, some closer to the current system, some even more utopian than the one I just outlined. The important thing is that as many people as possible realize how good the system could be: then they will be more likely to abandon the current system and support necessary change.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Wasn’t blogging invented for opinionated extroverts like me? 🙂
My blog is a way for me to vent, influence others, toy around with ideas, highlight results from colleagues (positively and negatively) and make myself be heard outside the usual circle of physically close colleagues. Science is all about communication – if you have a unique insight and never tell anybody, does it exist?
Friendfeed is of particular value for me, as I both get new ideas, results and information from there but can also influence the topics and discussions. It’s two-way science communication that you usually only get at conferences. At Friendfeed you’re basically at a science conference without a special topic 24/7 – exactly my kind of fix!
When and how did you discover science blogs?
Hmm, I don’t really know. I remember I started mine in 2003 because I thought everybody and their grandmother had one…
What are some of your favourite science blogs?
I don’t really read blogs per se. Most of the people with interesting things to say are on Firendfeed – and if they’re not, someone will link their blog posts there. With Friendfeed there’s hardly a need to read blogs. I would read blogs of colleagues I know personally and/or are in my field, but as of now I don’t know of any who blog but are not already on Friendfeed.
There’s one blog I visit regularly, though. Pharyngula – it’s just so entertaining. Thanks PZ!
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?
John Wilbanks‘ presentation on the semantic web was an eye-opener! The potential of this technology is huge and in part because of his presentation I’ve written a grant proposal to develop a web-based science communication system (think informal peer-review above) using semantic web technology – wish me luck!
It was so nice to see see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thanks for having me there, I had a great time. I would like to come again next year, but I haven’t decided, yet.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Russ Campbell from the Fishtown University 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? Who are you? What is your background?
Hi Bora. First, thank you for the opportunity to share with your readers. I’m a big fan of your blog and your work with ScienceOnline. I’m a native of the Fishtown-section of Philadelphia. During the past six years I have been putting down roots in Durham, NC. My background is in university communications. I worked the arts and culture beat at the University of Pennsylvania and in electronic communications at UNC-Chapel Hill. I have always loved science, but we had a bit of a falling out during the high school years when I met literature and Albert Camus. Then Jack Kerouac and the Beats came along.
The past four years have been interesting as I’m attempting to combine my two loves of science and literature. It’s not easy, but I think one of the benefits of my liberal arts training has been the ability to make stuff up.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
The short answer is a novelist, but I think in the past few years that goal has morphed into some kind of intellectual explorer. There’s so much I find fascinating that I have commitment issues. I guess you can look at the people I hold in high esteem–Benjamin Franklin, Camus, Pardis Sabeti–to see that what I want are possibilities. I want to search for wisdom. I want to be a part of a community that strives to look for both answers and questions.
What is your real life job?
I’m the communications officer for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private biomedical research foundation in North Carolina. The foundation also focuses on science education in North Carolina.
What I like most about my job is the freedom and flexibility I am allowed to explore new ideas like ScienceOnline. I think I have the greatest job in the world and I’m not just saying that because my boss might be reading.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
From a professional standpoint, I’m interested in how scientists use technology to share data. Your readers are more than aware of the explosion of data in recent years. It’s how scientists use that data I find interesting. Some fields of study are better than others.
But I’m also interested in the engagement factors of online media. There are a lot of great people out there doing interesting things, but I fear that a lot of it is preacher-to-choir.
How does blogging etc figure into your work?
I’m suspect about institutional blogs. That said, there is a place for it and some places do do it better than others. So blogging for me is on a more personal level with regard to work. I read a lot of different things on a lot of different topics so I created fishtownuniversity.com as an online notebook to attempt to make sense of what I was reading. I haven’t been very good about keeping it fresh, but I haven’t given up. In fact I should probably update before this comes out.
When and how did you discover science blogs? Favorites? New cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I discovered science blogs during the first N.C. science blogging conference in 2007. I didn’t know much about blogging. I’m not sure if I was even reading blogs then so the conference opened up a whole new world to me right in my backyard.
You were probably one of the first I started reading. Now I read The Intersection, Science Cheerleader, Isis, Abel Pharmboy, Kirsten Sanford’s A Bird’s Brain. I also like ScienceGoddess who set up a youtube channel for her book reviews.
I also follow several education blogs like Instructify and This Week in Education. I’m not going to mention the sports blogs–but I like what the Phillies are doing.
Is there anything that happened at the conference that changed the way your think about science communication?
There’s not a lot different in science communication then there is in creative writing. Two keys points are know your audience and tell a good story. One of the best things of last year’s conference was Rebecca Skloot‘s talk. Just an amazing and compelling story–I cannot wait for her book to come out.
As for the audience bit, it’s easy to get swept up in our own little worlds and circles. I try to keep in mind that there’s a much larger audience that doesn’t care what I, or anyone at ScienceOnline is saying. How do you reach that audience? When I start thinking about it my head hurts and I feel the need to read Derrida.
I started thinking about Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) around the time of the first science blogging conference. Here were all these people that worked within a 20 mile radius and I had no clue. Chris Brodie and I joke that the only time we got together for a beer was in San Francisco, Boston, or St. Louis. That was ridiculous as he worked a mile down the road. Brodie and I got together and made it happen and it has taken on a life of its own. There’s buy in and support from so many different people. It may be my proudest professional accomplishment.
It was nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January (and a few times before then).
Thank you very much. Keep up the good work and I look forward to the next time I see you.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Sam Dupuis from the Science of Sorts on My Mind blog (and yes, he is the son of John Dupuis, if the last name sounded familiar to you), to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Glad to be here, in that way one can be said to have a presence on the Internet. My full name is Samuel Allen Greene Dupuis, and a while ago I discovered that if I, for almost whatever reason, were to change my name, then I’d also go for an acronym that would, suffice to say, not be SAGD. I’m sixteen years old at the time of writing this (I was about to turn 16 when I was at ScienceOnline ’09). I currently go to Northern SS in Toronto, Canada, and I’m trying to emphasize math, science, and languages while I’m here. I’ve also found myself referring to my school path as a ‘build’, which may go to show exactly how much I play DotA (First, think World of Warcraft, The company that made it is Blizzard; they also make Warcraft III. This is a strategy game in which one may also create their own modified versions and spread them online; one map [a ‘version’ here is essentially a map with rules] is called Defence of the Ancients (DotA); I play it).
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up, and what is growing up anyway?
I plan on being either a medical researcher or a physicist, but plans change; I’ve had other ideas in the past, and I’ll probably have new ones later (being a politician just to see how I fare when I throw myself into the eye of the public storm). With regard to growing up, I’m thinking for now that the difference between someone in their late teens and someone who’s 40 or 50, as far as personality goes, isn’t huge. In my opinion, the difference may be between what they know when they’re younger and when they’re older.
Now, what said person ‘knows’ pretty much amounts to their experiences, from information they’ve acquired to experiences they’ve felt deeply affected by. It doesn’t seem like an easily falsifiable hypothesis, so for now I’m just noting it as almost entirely pointless, but amusing, speculation. Growing up, as far as I know, would be an increase in maturity up to some semi- (but not completely) arbitrary threshold, which would be some series of thresholds across a wide range of ways a person behaves. Now, it seems that I’ve become a nihilist over the last few years (I’d only really thought about it recently, and I figure myself to be the heroic variety as defined in this article. Please trust me not to have said this only because it looks awesome, and I acknowledge this is only coming from Wikipedia).
I think words like maturity, good, bad and beneficial are subjective through and through, and that one doesn’t always have to be mature to benefit oneself and society (Please note that I have and will continue to toss these words around for now for simplicity’s sake– because we’re all ok with that, right?). I’ll say now that the one thing I may never change my mind on is that I’ll be changing my mind on at least something or another for as long as I live. And though I may try to mature for a while, I may go where I will depending on what I’m thinking at the time, because when predicting the future, even my own, I’m very ambiguous. So I’ll probably do some more growing up, maybe some growing down (shrinking?) and other maturity-morphing sideways, forwards, backwards, and into other imagined dimensions where I find them (because I like trying to think outside the cube).
What is your Real Life job?
I did some volunteering over the summer–it ended yesterday, and I’ve looked after some guy’s house for small amounts of money (taking turns/splitting the money with my brother, at that), but I’m still a jobless high school student. In fact, my brother has a job, and he’s only entering high school this year. I like to say I’m less of a materialist and capitalist than he is. He retorts by calling me a jobless hippie. We’re at a standstill on that one right now.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t explored these in much depth. This may just be a thought that occurred to me because my attention span can be sub-par, but I’ve been wondering how people can most efficiently manage citation and other references online. For instance, say you’re in one of the endless number of online arguments about something in which there isn’t necessarily scientific consensus, but there is a substantial amount of literature from experts, as well as data to go with it. Now, there are people who simply won’t be careful enough with how they manage this without at least being told sternly to do so, but otherwise it can be annoying (at least from my point of view) to comb through huge amounts of writing to, to some degree, memorize every single relevant point (so you don’t get berated for missing it, on top of actually being better informed).
I’ve been wondering (just now, not for any serious length of time) if there’s some sort of more advanced search system for word documents that doesn’t just find specific words or phrases, but that can also search on specific pages when prompted, specific paragraphs, sections, and any (or some) other conceivable divisions a document can have– even on one or another side of media or other objects that may be in the document. Also, what if one could import parameters from someone else that would take the receiver to exactly where the sender intended? What if one could also have searches that could open up other windows or at least show different parts of a document at the same time, for example, pairing original text and annotations? There are probably myriad other places such Xtremely-advanced searching could go, and there may also be the equivalents (or the same things) as everything I’ve mentioned, somewhere out there. Much or all of it may just be further convenience for the already lazy. Still, I’m interested in more accessibility not necessarily geared only toward experts (who are presumably more patient anyway), but as a way to more easily spread relevant information to laypeople (from laypeople and experts alike) who aren’t otherwise willing to look carefully and for a while through piles of information when not all of it is actually necessary with regard to what’s relevant to the issue at hand (I had been mostly thinking about that since SO09, pretty much, but I’ve also been interested by all the citations on Wikipedia).
What would I pair that with? A chat system, which in turn would be combined with a forum, sounds interesting; ScienceOnline is itself largely about the many ways scientists can communicate with each other, so I’m sure there are several versions of the pairing I just mentioned. With the addition of many of the other services that are becoming, have become and may become available, this might be one more thing tacked on that, hopefully, would be helpful without being intrusive, bulky, redundant, or otherwise unneeded.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? How much will they in the future?
In Grade 9, I had a science project to do that was supposed to be about anything that had to do with the curriculum. They were pretty loose on this definition: if it in any way had to do with space, biology, physics, or electromagnetism (the very direct subset of physics we went into with more detail), you could go on any sort of quest to find out more about it provided you could and it was legal. This was such an open-ended and large assignment that my mind was blown for a couple of minutes (not because it was only one or another, but both). Then I wasn’t sure what to do. I can’t remember who later suggested a blog (me or my dad, who’s prodded me a lot and for a while now to keep my blog going), but I ended up writing a blog about what I could learn about space exploration. It has simply become my blog, and is found at samandspace.blogspot.com. I’ve been filling the blog with things I find online, when I get inspired (but often when my dad asks for some consistency, too; he still often gives me great places to go, too), and it’s had a few visitors from Google or links from my dad’s blog. I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that a solid portion of these visitors have been from faraway countries, but it’s still amazing to see that tracked.
Blogging aside, I haven’t really used much social networking at school; often I use email for working out project dates and for handling electronic information with group members, and toward the end of last year I found Facebook useful for contacting people in a hurry (because I’m not the only person I know who lets things go down to the wire). I got on Twitter briefly for some reason I’ve now forgotten, and I haven’t used Friendfeed or any other site specifically used for networking with an identity. I went on Omegle for a week or so at one point, just because conversations could occasionally go to heights that were beyond hilarity. All in all I haven’t used social networking much at school, but I’m coming to use it more.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I found out about science blogs (more specifically scienceblogs.com) a few years ago… when my dad told me about them. That constant aspect of my knowledge has been embarrassing, but I still have to mention it. I guess I’ll be looking more at Bora’s blog now (I probably should have visited more of these right after the conference), and in the past my dad’s talked about Uncertain Principles and Not Even Wrong the former is on SB, the latter is the first result of a Google search). So far, I’ve liked things each of these blogs brings to the table. It’s a small number I know right now, and each of them has pretty much equally grabbed my attention (although I don’t, again, actually use scientific networking too much right now– blasphemer!). At the conference itself, it wasn’t so much an issue of finding any new blogs, but of actually remembering the names of some of them from the endless tide. I haven’t, but I do now have the luxury of combing through the interviews Bora’s conducting (I only knew they existed a few weeks ago when- surprise- my dad told me he had been contacted about my interview). I do plan on checking these out in more detail at the end of the summer though, because the variety of information looks interesting to no end (I’ll have little, if any, access to the Internet for the coming month).
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, blog-writing and whatever else you may be doing over the course of your life?
As with finding blogs, it isn’t so much an issue of if I found anything, but if I could remember even half of all the things I thought would be useful knowledge for later. I had been advised to take notes in each session (I won’t even bother saying who gave that advice now), and those notes should still be somewhere in the house. One thing that had been discussed in the conference that I am actively annoyed about because I can’t remember it clearly (although I don’t think it was a simple construct) was how some open-source projects do actually make money for the people behind them, such as PLoS. This actually seems a bit relevant to what I want to do for a living later: I would like to work in the public domain, and one would just have to take my word for it that I’m thinking of that because even if the pay isn’t phenomenal, the goal would be to work somewhat out of goodwill as well as the quest for capital, and I’ll get epic job stability if I work at a university, for a while, and do very well. The conference further inspired me to take a look at what I actually want to work toward when I go to work, not only pulling in money for food and shelter (again, if I end up with a ‘real job’, which I’m still hoping for), but actually providing something useful to the people I’m working for. Going into open-source, copyleft (I found that word out recently and wherever I did, I regret not being able to give that person credit) and the sort would presumably indicate the person going into it has good intentions. They may also be taking the high road solely to impress people, say they did, or for some other selfish reason, but everyone reading can only take my word on it that those aren’t the only things I’m thinking of.
It was also reinforced at the conference that there’s a lot to be critical of in the world of science, and that one has to look patiently and carefully at where ‘something’ (a tool, a database, etc.) comes from, how it’s used, who’s using it, how it’s turning out, etc. to find out whether or not it’s doing what it was designed to do (or at least that it’s being used ethically– I have to credit a lot of what I remember to Bjoern). Every time I go to a conference like this one (I have been to a couple), it shows me more of the complexity and inner workings of scientific establishments, both their good sides and bad. Further, it makes me interested in examining them even more.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
I hope to see you and everyone else (I knew of) again too (and many more)!
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Henry Gee, the senior editor at Nature and blogger at I, Editor and The End Of The Pier Show , to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock.
Thank you. It’s nice to be here. Nice decor. Hessian up the walls. Very 1970s. I like the lava lamp. This sofa needs re-uphostering, though. The smell. I think something’s crawled down the back and died.
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?
Delighted. Fire away.
Who are you?
Well, there’s a thing. It rather depends whom you ask. To some, I am the Chosen One. To others, I’m the big fat bloke who’s always in the way when they want to take a photograph of Cromer Pier. To yet others, I’m the man at the back with the dog. I have lived in all places. I have lived in all ages. Destined to wander the face of the Earth forever, I am the Eternal Champion, the Wandering Jew, the Scapegoat, the Highlander, the Serpent with a Thousand Young, the Seven-Headed Messiah. I am Bakrug the Great Water-Lizard, Execrated of Sarnath. I am all these things, and yet, none of them, the One-In-All. If you ever find out who I am, you will tell me, won’t you? You might start by asking my wife. She might know. As for me, I haven’t the faintest idea.
What is your (scientific) background?
That mural at Yale by Rudolph Zallinger called ‘The Age of Reptiles‘. That should be enough scientific background for anybody.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Hang on – did you notice a solidus in that question? Did you? Two questions in one – very sneaky. So what’s it to be – to do, or to be? Do? Be? Do be do be do? A lounge singer. Obviously. Mona Lisa. Buddy Can You Spare A Dime. All that old-school stuff. Ask me another.
What is your Real Life job?
[takes call on iPhone] Really? Is that so? Amazing. Sell the unicycle! Do it now! What were you thinking of? Sorry – my real life job? Ah yes. I work for a weekly magazine called Nature. You might have heard of it. It’s quite well known. My father was terribly disappointed when I joined. He thought it was a magazine for nudists and that I’d give him free copies. You should have seen his face fall when I told him it was mainly about the release of calcium from intracellular stores, all of them fully clothed.
But that was then, just after the relief of Mafeking. Poor old Mafeking, he’d been standing outside the Men’s Room for about a year and was hopping from foot to foot, fit to burst. Anyway, after he’d gone in I started as a junior reporter. After a while they threw me a few bones that nobody wanted, and for a few years I headed up the distant ancestor of Nature’s online news output, as well as writing Nature’s weekly press release, and handling all the manuscripts in organismal biology. I can’t believe I had the energy. These days it’s all I can do to handle just half our organismal biology submissions.
I also devised and edit Nature’s SF column, Futures. This has been going for ten years, and, like the proverbial Man from Devizes, has won an award. The European Science Fiction Society bestowed upon Nature the honour of being ‘Best SF Publisher’ of 2005. Nobody has yet come up to my face and said that everything Nature publishes is science fiction, but then, you can see my face from a long way off, and having seen it, you’d probably want to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. If you were to ask me to summarize my job in a sentence, I’d say I was Nature’s Senior Editor in charge of Sex, Death and Aliens from Outer Space.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Twitter. If you’d have asked me a year ago, I’d have said the Acheulean hand axe, but, you know, change is fast in the field of communications, Web-2.0 and whatnot. You have to keep up.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
I have a large figure, as some have been indelicate enough to notice, and blogging has a figure to match. It’s enormously important to me. As Winston Churchill wished to say in an address to the Free French: when he looked back at his career, he saw that it was divided into two parts. Being Churchill, he actually said this in French. His French was rudimentary to say the least, and what came out was ‘quand je regarde mon derriere je vois qu’il est divise en deux parts’. Which went down a storm. Blogging has transformed my life, so that I can see my past sundered, as it were, by a cleft of Churchillian magnitude, behind which – that is to say, beyond – is a past, as if another country, in which blogging didn’t happen. However, when I look back at Churchill’s bottom, I see that a lot of the writing I’ve always done, right back to student days, when I should have been sweeping up the Emerald Bar (don’t look for it, it isn’t there any more) was, how shall we say, bloggy. I think I was born to blog. Blogging is my middle name. Actually, it isn’t. My middle name, that is. My middle name is, in fact, ‘Ernest’. I am trying to convince my children that the ‘E’ stands for ‘Extraordinary’ but they remain unpersuaded.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
It all started when Matt Brown, the London Editor of Nature Network, wanted to start a blogging platform. I tried to tell him that the thing he was putting together in his garage from a jam jar, three egg boxes, a recycled melamine kitchen worktop and several lengths of damp bailer twine loosely knotted together would never achieve powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight, but Matt – bless him – was like all pioneers, eyes to the stars, feet firmly planted in mid-air. I couldn’t bear to see the lad fail, so when he asked me to supply some hot air to give it lift, I could hardly refuse. I started blogging at Nature Network in February, 2007. The blog was called ‘The End Of The Pier Show’, but it’s now called I, Editor, and The End Of The Pier Show has moved to Blogger. I try to confine my Nature-Network blog to more-or-less scientific things, so I can devote my energies on ‘The End Of The Pier Show’ to right-wing politics and animal husbandry. This might seem a somewhat odd juxtaposition, but I can assure you that by the time you get to Cromer the distinction between them is moot.
Later in 2007 I went to SciFoo, and that was another turning point. I remember arriving at the hotel, putting down my girrafe, and, resolving to conquer my inherent shyness, decided I’d go up to the first person I met and introduce myself. Especially if I could cadge a cigarette. (I still smoked back then. These days I only smoke through my ears). So it was that I met Bora Zivkovic. Perhaps you’ve met him? He is one of the most prolific science bloggers in the iSphere. In fact, he told me that the only way his mother can reach him is by leaving comments on his blog, in Serbian. Small world, eh? In fact, it was through blogs that Bora visited Cromer, where I live, and that’s the next thing – it might seem odd to have a meatspace conference about blogging, but there are times when you have to meat (sorry, ‘meet’) people in real life.
The Science Online ’09 conference was great, as I met many US-based bloggers in person, for the first time, people like Abel Pharmboy, Scicurious, GrrlScientist, PalMD, the Flying Trilobite, Greg Laden, and many others. It was meeting these people in person that got me interested in their blogs, so the horizons of my own particular blogosphere have broaded immeasurably since the conference, in a way that they might not have done. But because blogging is such a personal activity, the lines between the real and the virtual can be blurred. For example, I ran into Eva Amsen (Expression Patterns, EasternBlot), and we were both convinced we’d met each other before. We had to sit down and think it through very carefully before we realized that we’d never actually met. It was weird.
I heard that your session (co-moderated with Pete Binfield) about ‘becoming a journal editor’ was an ur-example of what an Unconference session should look like.
OK, you tell me. What should an Unconference session look like? Joking apart, I’ve gradually moved to an unconference style of presentation in most everything I do. This is partly because I’m sartorially confused and just plain bone idle, and partly because I have a horror of gadgetry breaking down mid-lecture. But it’s mostly because, when I go out to labs and give seminars on what I get up to as a Nature editor, I’ve found that a rigid style of presentation makes peoples’ eyes glaze over. Honestly, whenever anyone these days gives a Powerpoint presentation it’s like Village of the Damned. Instead, I just say who I am (honestly, many people are amazed to find that Nature editors are even vaguely human) and then invite questions. Frequently asked questions include how do I go about choosing referees for papers; the criteria I use to consider papers for possible publication; the politics of supplementary information; the status of open peer-review and free-access publication in the world today; how much they need to bribe me to guarantee publication; and whether I spilled their pint. So, as you can imagine, the time flies by.
It was good to co-moderate the session with Pete Binfield of PLoS ONE, because we complemented each other – I am concerned with the nuts and bolts of handling manuscripts, whereas he is a managing editor, concerned with strategy and the business side. I don’t think people are always as aware as they might be of such distinctions. If you think of me as a Film Director, responsible for the editorial content, Pete would be the Film Producer, responsible for the financial and logistical backup.
I remember the session being packed out. I think some people had come expecting a fight. Before the session I definitely overheard people who might have been ticket touts, and gossip that included the phrase ‘wrestling in mud’. I’m sorry if people were disappointed.
How was it for you?
The Earth moved, baby. Pity I’ve given up smoking.
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?
nothing in particular – just a lot of memories and the warm fuzziness of good fellowship; of having finally found, after all these years, the promises of dawns that turn out to be false and a past littered with the corpses of failed relationships, a community of people in which I feel I belong. I should stop now, as I’m gonna cry.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview.
My pleasure. Do you know if the next bus goes to the station?
It does, but the train goes nowhere. I hope to see you again next January.
Do you now? I don’t remember agreeing to a second date. But you seem very nice, and I’m sure I’ll be free. What did you say your name was?
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Elissa Hoffman, a blogging biology teacher, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Elissa Hoffman and I’m from Wisconsin. I’m a high school science teacher at Appleton East High School. Specifically, I teach biology and AP Biology. I have a BA in biology with minors in environmental studies and education, and when I was in college we divided biology majors into two categories – “big thing biologists” and “little thing biologists”. I was definitely in the “big thing” group – I had a huge focus on aquatic ecology and spent many happy hours mucking through rivers, Secchi disks and phytoplankton sampling bottles in tow. My senior research project actually involved the feeding behaviors of Daphnia, which required me to do a lot of microvideotaping! Now that I’m teaching, though, my interests have broadened. I still love ecology, but I’m also really passionate about teaching evolution, genetics, botany, and anat/phys.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I added a master’s degree in Educational Leadership a few years ago, so I’m considering a move to school administration. However, given my penchant for setting goals, I’m currently looking at other options as well – debating the merits of various doctoral programs vs. getting another master’s degree. At the moment, given school budget cuts, I’m pretty happy to be where I am!
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I just love the ability to make connections with real people! Getting the chance to communicate directly with people who are doing actual scientific research or have cool science-related jobs is really, really invigorating.So often we in K-12 education are isolated from people who aren’t part of our school network, and not being connected to current scientific research means that our students aren’t hearing about it! I’ve had several guest bloggers on my class blog who have done a fabulous job of reminding my students that scientific research is still going on – that not all of the cool discoveries have already been made – and that researchers are real people who have social lives and fun personalities.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I have a class blog – I started it in January 2008 on a whim, thinking that since no one at my school was currently blogging with students I might as well try it out. After a few issues with making it work on our server, I unveiled it to the kids who were – well, unimpressed. Most of them had no idea what a blog was. When I talk about it with my new crop of students this fall, most of them STILL will have no idea what a blog is. But they catch on pretty quickly and I think they really like it! I’ve had them write posts, read posts, comment back and forth on each others’ posts, and in general become comfortable with blogs and blog etiquette. I am thinking about using some guest bloggers again this year and anyone who’s interested can email me (hoffmanelissa (at sign) aasd.k12.wi.us).
I’ve also got Twitter accounts (both personal and work-related) and a presence on Facebook. We do set up a class group on Facebook – the kids can join the group (i.e. “Mrs. Hoffman’s AP Bio 2008-09”, etc.) without having to “friend” me, which removes any ickiness or awkwardness. The group lets me distribute email messages to the kids really quickly and also lets me post links, photos, etc. that all of the kids can access.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
Probably sometime in 2007 – I really have no idea how I wandered into it. I do know that once ScienceBlogs picked up steam, it became a very exciting place to lurk! My RSS reader has a mixture of science blogs, health & medicine blogs, education blogs, and mommy blogs – there are an awful lot of favorites in there!
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 can’t really pinpoint any one particular thing. It was a really great weekend – I was definitely not sure what to expect going into it, wondering if I was going to be in over my head with all of these uber-bloggers, but it worked out pretty well! I loved meeting everyone and having great conversations about science, blogging, and education.
It was so nice to finally meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
It was very nice to meet you – thanks for all you do for blogging and for the conference!!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Erica Tsai, the co-organizer of the Friday evening events at ScienceOnline’09, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Duke University. I’m in the field of comparative phylogeography which means I look at how the geographic ranges of related species change as their shared environment changes. In particular, I study how a parasitic plant (yes, plants can be parasites too!) and its host tree shifted their distributions due to climate changes following the last ice age.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
One thing I’ve done in relation to blogging is to help run a high school student science blog. For a few summers (though not currently), I worked with the Howard Hughes Precollege Program at Duke University. This program is targeted at local high schoolers (especially minorities and women) interested in exploring basic science. The students work in research labs and blog about their experiences.
Was it easy to get the students interested in blogging?
In some sense, yes. These students are generally high achieving and good at academics, so they are very amenable to doing whatever is asked of them, which is great! I would guess that they looked at it as yet another “homework assignment”. I regret that we weren’t able to better integrate them into online science communities or to introduce them to online resources.
What do you wish you had taught them?
The blogs were seen as an online diary for each person, and that’s where the interaction ended. There wasn’t a question of reading another person’s diary! That’s missing a major point of online science. There’s the community aspect, even if you are just a lurker. I would have liked to better equip them with online science tools: set them up with an rss reader, point them to Science Blogs, discuss a new article on ScienceDaily, how to set up google alerts/article alerts, etc. I’d be interested in what your readers would put on a list of “Tips and tricks to being part of the online science community”. That’s not to say that some students didn’t figure this out. It just wasn’t due to any training from us! For instance, Trisha Saha, a student in the undergraduate Howard Hughes program, was so savvy she’s now blogging for Nature Network.
What blogging guidelines did you give the students?
I was surprised at the number of restrictions that came up during this process. First were the many privacy issues of the laboratories involved. For instance, I think a student blogged about some protein she was working on as her research project. But, oops, the PI didn’t want it out that they were even working on that protein! Also, there were some safety guidelines (not necessarily pertaining to the students, but rather to protect the labs). For example, students were asked not to post photos of animals, cages, or anything that might inflame anti-animal testing activists. There was some disagreement about how appropriate that rule was, but a conservative approach was taken.
What was the disagreement about?
It was fundamentally about what is the point of the student blogs. The students were asked to do two main things, one stated and the other unstated. Stated: Report honestly and openly about your experiences. Unstated: These experiences should be positive, professional, and noncontroversial. The first of the unstated rules, while off-putting to us rebellious types, wasn’t actually much of an issue. I think this is partly due to the high quality of the program (so there weren’t that many problems to report on), and the natural reticence against airing your dirty laundry in public. This reticence, of course, runs counter to the desire for frankness in a blog, so sometimes their posts took on a glossy sheen. I mean, did you really happily and eagerly redo that failed PCR for a tenth time?
The professional and noncontroversial rules were more challenging for me. For instance, a student posted about where the whole lab went out for lunch; another student wrote about how all the students met to play frisbee. Some administrators were aghast, how unprofessional! What will a college admissions officer think of that? I was thinking, do you know how many food blogs I read? I can’t help feeling like this is where a blogger becomes human. It lends credibility to the realness of their writing and makes them more likable. What’s bad about that? This relates to the broader question of what your online presence should be. Just professional? Some personal? My friends and I have argued about having a ‘personal’ or ‘about me’ tab on our websites. Some are solidly in the “not one iota of personal information”, “it should all be about my research” camp. My counter is, what do you look at when you go to someone’s website? I always go for the ‘personal’ tab. I’m just curious! Maybe I’m searching for a human connection. And that connection makes it more likely I’ll remember you, want to read your papers, and work with you in the future.
The noncontroversial rule is the one, I think, that runs most counter to being a successful and popular blog. Uncontroversial can mean boring. Especially if we scare the kids into writing only positive and professional posts. Uncontroversial can also mean discouraging deep thinking and discussion about an issue. I have one example in mind:
A student was working in a lab that performed animal experiments, where different treatments were given and in the end the animals were euthanized. He described some of the procedures in a post, and did so in a very flippant and callous way. The way it was described was horrible! I imagined PETA or some other activist group swarming down — and with good reason! Obviously, the PI would have used very different language in describing this experiment, as I’m sure he did to an animal ethics board to gain clearance for it. So the short end of the story is that we asked the student to change the language. But the broader point was lost, and I’ve found myself puzzling over how better to handle these situations in the future. His original crude language was essentially truthful, but highly controversial and embarrassing. An activist would argue that if an experiment shorn of scientific jargon is repellent, we shouldn’t be doing it. I’m sensitive to that, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to make any lab a target for bio-terrorism. I wish we had encouraged deeper thinking on the matter and had him write a more thoughtful, measured, analysis of the matter.
What was the point of the student’s blog?
At worst, it’s a way of generating PR for the program, and it gives students practice at writing about science. At best, it gets students to be thoughtful about their experiences, which hopefully expands and deepens the experience. Also, it’d be ideal if it got students to explore topics they wouldn’t normally, and if it challenged them to think really hard about something!
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thanks so much for interviewing me, Bora! And I enjoyed working with you on the conference very much.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Djordje Jeremic (yes, he is the son of Tanja Sova), of the Paper Disciple’s 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? Who are you? Where are you from? What is your interest in science? How about art?
Why thank you! I am Djordje Jeremic, better known by my alter-ego, Paper Disciple (paperdisciple.etsy.com and paperdisciple.wordpress.com). I am an acolyte of Plicania, the Origami Muse, a beautiful but fickle mistress. [Everyone chill out. Mistress is the female form of Master, and that is what I am referring to.] My Lady graced me with the curiosity and skill in origami at an early age, and while she does not require blood sacrifice (no paper cuts to date), she is a merciless tyrant over my sleep, and she demands attention. But I love her nonetheless, as she has granted me many (read: more than 2) inspirations at times of crisis.
Now, the following is for the skeptics of the existence of goddesses and fairies (heretics!).
I am a legal immigrant (gasp! they do exist!). I began my exo-womb life in a hospital in Yugoslavia, a land which has changed size, shape and name with such agility that it would shame the chameleons, octopi, and cuttlefish of the world put together. Currently it is Serbia, or represented algebraically: Serbia = [(Serbia & Montenegro) – Montenegro – Kosovo…]. Most of my life I have moved around. At twelve I moved to Arizona, and then 2 years later to North Carolina, where I am currently residing and starting to set up some tentative roots.
My main interests in just about anything are divided into the want to know, and the searching for the purpose of said knowledge. It is a great pleasure to find out just how things work. Every time I learn something new, I feel like a child disassembling a watch to see the little gears spinning.
Continuing with the clock metaphor, after opening it and taking the gears out, I would look for a place to use the gears. Not just as a coffee holder, like some are fond of using CD-roms for, but wisely, according to what I learned. Knowledge without purpose is dull, and purpose without knowledge is dangerous. No, not just dangerous, but also slightly stupid.
I like art. [I would like to introduce a word here, if it is alright with everyone. Scotoma is the medical term for having a part of your vision disabled, but it is also a reference to a psychological trick. Remember the picture of the vase, where if you look at it differently, it looks like two faces? That effect.] Scotoma lends the possibility of being able to look at the same piece of art over and over again and every time see a new image. This obviously only works with abstract painting and some other forms, and I LOATHE abstract painting. A block of random splashes does not represent the soul equivalent of a jaguar in a jungle. I respect greatly artists who can work in apparently random smears of pigment and oil, while managing to bring out more than confusion or base emotions from the viewer.
My favorite art genres are extreme realism, and surrealism. Well, not exactly extreme realism, a photo will do, but a well done oil painting is a joy to my heart. [My atrial ventricle flaps excitedly whenever I see any of Rembrandt’s work]. Surrealism I like because it challenges your view of the world. [In Arizona I was participating in a mock Congress. My M.O. was to prepare arguments for both sides of a debate and then fight for the less represented one. I make a magnificent Devil’s Advocate.] Besides, who doesn’t like the image of a reverse magic carpet ride, with the carpet as the rider, rolled up and sitting on a flying human?
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
A plane pilot. Not a Boeing, however. Being inside a gargantuan monster of steel is not my idea of a fun time. I want a one, maybe two person old style airplane, like the ones they [“They” is a weasel word and is thus not approved by Wikipedia. We’re not on Wikipedia, though.] used in WW1.[not to be confused with www1, the first internet.] I want to feel the rush of the air around me. Come to think of it, the best would be if I could fly unassisted by machines. If it turns out I can’t afford such a plane, I will go skydiving every weekend or so.
For money, I am going to either take people for rides, or fold origami professionally. Maybe even get a decent job [only if I have to]. There’s not much to it. Living like the squirrel: eat what you need, store up only for one winter, and never stay too long in one place. And, everywhere I go, I will bring my trusty laptop and wi-fi hijacker [don’t have one yet] although by the time I am 25, this very computer I am typing on and the one you are reading from will both be relics in a museum, antiques at best.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The increased speed and accuracy of facts. The internet serves as a library full of librarians and writers and proofreaders. If you wanted to check what the coagulation speed of 10 milliliters of baboon blood were (just a shot in the dark, I don’t know why I picked the examples), all that is necessary is several clicks to get mostly accurate information. The world wide web, in my opinion, is a handy tool to have around, but is not a supplement to all research.
I like PloS. I do not use it as much as I would like to, but the times that I do it is educational and even fun. Every time I go there, it is like throwing darts at a carnival, but you can’t miss.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your life and work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? What are some of the differences in the ways teenagers use the Web in comparison to adults who grew up without it and later in life migrated online?
I started my blog recently, 1) as a tool of flagrant self promotion, which I used mercilessly to herd millions into buying my origami on etsy. I wish. To my knowledge, the site was only visited by a couple of people, few of which bought something. 2) as a vent for my teenage angst, romance, and idiocy. It was my wall to graffiti on. Still is.
I cannot tell what it is like to be an adult who migrated, since I am 16, but as a teenager who grew up next to it, it is natural, like an arm. The way dolphins probably viewed the ocean prior to all the filth we [homo sapiens (severe irony. sapiens means wise. )] dumped into it.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I did not discover scienceblogs.com, I was dragged headfirst into it, kicking and screaming, only to find it a nice place with polite people. I usually keep to Blog around the clock (HI BORA!) and Pharyngula, but every now and then I will trawl for fresh waters. I can’t name all the people who I visited here, but they all have brilliant ideas.
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 studies, art, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Yes. My favorites were discovering that there are adolescents of my mental age blogging, as well as the fact that there are a LOT of people who are great company, all of them as geeky as I am and probably more. That, and it also appears that scienceblogs.com is not run by one man in a missile silo in colorado.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
(Christopher Walken voice) And I… shall see you, there. *insert creepy Mr. Burns-esque photo here*
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Bob O’Hara of the Deep Thoughts and Silliness 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Bob O’Hara, but I comment on blogs and such places under the absolutely impenetrable pseudonym of Bob O’H. I have a blog on Nature Network, called Deep Thoughts and Silliness.
I’m a full time academic, which means I get to be both a nerd and as obscure as I can manage. I used to be a plant epidemiologist, but I now work in biostatistics, mainly in ecology and evolutionary biology.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Senile.
What is your Real Life job?
Butler to The Beast (pictured). It’s only a part-time position, and he pays me in cat hair, which the bank doesn’t accept. I think it must be because they don’t like Australian currency.
When I’m not acting as a resting place, I’m an Academy Fellow. The academy in question is the Academy of Finland: the position is basically that of a lecturer, only without the lecturing. I live in Helsinki, dodging the polar bears and itinerant OS developers.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I really enjoy the pissing around, rather than taking the science too seriously. But I am now becoming more interested in using online tools for collaboration, for example wikis. A lot of my work is collaborative, so I’m looking for tools to make it easier. Emailing Word documents is hardy optimal.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I’ve used blogging to kick a few ideas around, getting one piece published, and stirring up interest with some others. I’m using wikis to help collaboration, but I think they don’t integrate well enough into usual work practices yet. I guess we’ll have to wait for Google Wave.
Other social networks don’t really figure in my work, except as excellent vehicles for prevarication. Few of my colleagues use them, so they don’t figure in my work. Hopefully that will improve.
When and how did you discover science blogs?
I can’t remember! I had looked at Panda’s Thumb a few times, but really started following it during the hilarities of the Dover trial. That dragged me into other science blogs (I know it’s not original, but Pharyngula was one of the first blogs I read – at least it was before ScienceBlogs started up).
What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
There are too many good blogs to plug! But a couple of blogs that I think should be better known are Prerogative of Harlots and Masks of Eris. Masks of Eris, in particular, should be required reading, especially if you want to understand Finland and the Finnish mentality.
I think I also have to plug Grllllllsciennntissssst, and her efforts to win a trip to Antarctica.
I didn’t discovered any new bloggers, but meeting Propter Doc reminded me to check out her blog more often.
Why did you come to the Conference?
It was mainly to meet people who I knew virtually in the flesh. I had met some poeple in London, but obviously not many Americans.
I was hoping to meet JanieBelle, but she didn’t attend, and sent her grouchy uncle Lou instead.
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?
Probably the main thing was the discussion of Open Access. It’s something I find interesting from the sociological point of view: the technology has opened up the possibilities for OA, but acceptance of it needs some changes in the way we pay for publication. On top of simply the finances, web based publishing makes it possible to try out some very interesting ideas.
What was clear to me was that there is a large gap between the idealism of some OA advocates, and the world that most scientists inhabit. So, the idea that journals shouldn’t have to judge importance when deciding whether to publish a piece of research seems naïve: there is certainly a place for that sort of journal (as readers of this blog are well aware!), but I think the importance of publishing in a “good” journal can’t be ignored: whether we like it or not, scientists use this as a marker for the quality of their work, for gloating to their colleagues, or for judging other researchers’ output. This is part of the sociology of science: it’s how we behave as scientists. My impression is that this simply isn’t appreciated by some OA advocates, and it can make their message sound irrelevant.
As an experienced denizen of the blogosphere, I know that I don’t have to provide any answers – I can criticise as much as I want!
It was so nice to finally meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
And you. I had a lot of fun in NC, so hopefully I’ll be able to visit again next year.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Stacy Baker, everyone’s favorite Biology cyber-teacher, to answer a few questions.
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a high school biology teacher. I’ve taught general, honors, and advanced placement biology for the past four years. Prior to teaching I worked as a biologist and studied seabirds in the Pribilof Islands and migrating seabirds off the Atlantic coast. I also worked a few years in wildlife rehabilitation. I have a BS in Zoology from Washington State University.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
When I was growing up I would answer, “Anything, but a teacher.” I’m serious! My mom’s a teacher and growing up watching her work long hours and get very little very financial reward turned me against the profession. Why on earth would anyone want to be a teacher?
Life has a funny way of making you eat your words. When I was working in the field I would occasionally have the opportunity to share what I was doing with local K-12 students. My colleagues said I had a gift for teaching and I suppose when enough people tell you you’re really good at something you start to wonder if it’s what you’re meant to do. I’ve really enjoyed teaching despite its many frustrations. The kids make it fun. Some days I feel like I’ve spent the whole day laughing.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The web makes current science accessible to my students. The Open Access movement and science blogs make it easy to connect my students with scientists and original research. The web is a great way to make science exciting again. My students get tired of learning about what’s already been done and it excites them to talk with scientists about what is currently being researched. If a scientist talks with them about what they’re doing, my students often will (on their own without even being asked) research everything about that topic and learn all the content they need to know in the process. Some of these students are the ones who walked into my classroom saying they hate science. They walk out with a completely different attitude.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Flickr, Ning, Facebook and others?
My students maintain and update our class blog, Extreme Biology. At the beginning of every school year, a new group of students is trained on how to use the blog. For most of my students this is the first introduction they’ve had into blogging so the learning curve is pretty steep. I’m hopeful that as the years go by, more students will enter my class having already used blogs and other web tools and I’ll be able to skip the time-consuming training and jump right into the science. As the year progresses, my students will discover new tools for us to try. They find current science research to blog about and then put a creative spin on the topic in order to educate their peers. Some of them write songs, create animations, make videos, and previous students return to share advice. We even had our own series of interviews of Science Online ’09 participants!
In addition to the blog we have a class wiki, youtube channel, twitter, and ning. The public twitter was only started at the end of the last school year so it hasn’t really taken off, yet. I also have a private twitter feed with my students.
The session about using the Web in the classroom which you led together with eight of your students was The Big Hit of the Conference. We all learned a lot from it. What did you learn from it, from the audience questions and comments?
First, I want to thank everyone in the audience for being so wonderful and treating my students like mini-celebrities! They floated on clouds for weeks afterward! We learned that kids really have a lot of power when it comes to how the web is being used. Their voices truly matter. My students arrived at the conference feeling unsure and a bit intimidated, but they left with a ton of confidence. The audience fired questions at them the entire time and the students did a remarkable job of answering.
I floated on clouds for weeks afterward!
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
The details are too fuzzy because it’s been so many years now. Yours! But, in addition to yours there are too many great science blogs to pick favorites. I will say that my students have received a lot of positive feedback from bloggers they’ve interacted with here on ScienceBlogs and I’m really grateful for that. Many of the blogs mentioned at the conference I already knew about, but my students made a ton of new discoveries.
You have some experience with research in the field. What motivated you to spend this summer in the lab, learning some of the most cutting-edge techniques in molecular and cellular neuroscience – not easy stuff to do by all means?
This summer I’m working in Michael Nitabach’s lab at Yale studying circadian rhythms in fruit flies. The project is funded by a NIH grant directed at getting science teachers involved in research. While I can’t share the details of the original research project Dr. Nitabach has me working on, I can say it’s very exciting and that I’m learning a lot. The lab is pretty fast-paced as its filled with post-docs, grad students, and undergrads. A lot of great ideas get thrown around in the “fly room” each day, during lab meetings, and department cookie breaks. I love all the Drosophila jargon that gets thrown around and I’m trying to convince the lab to make “fly pusher” shirts this summer. Fruit flies are a fun model to work with and they make genetics very accessible to students so I’m excited about taking everything I’ve learned back to the classroom. Check out the cool fly brain I dissected last week!
The experience I’m gaining in Dr. Nitabach’s lab is going to make me a better teacher. I didn’t enter the teaching profession in the traditional way. At the risk of upsetting the traditionalists, I believe there is total lunacy in allowing a person to teach science who has never actually practiced science. You can’t learn science by reading textbooks or taking educational methodology classes. Every science teacher needs to have the experience of participating in original research and they need to routinely refresh their skills. The last time I performed science in the field was five years ago. I feel quite rusty. In my perfect teaching ideal, science educators would teach for 4-5 years and then take one-year off to work on an original research project. I realize this is incredibly unrealistic thanks to the immobile system we have in place to train teachers, but due to my non-traditional background this type of ideal is possible for me.
The NIH grant was offered through the use of the ARRA money. Hopefully, NIH will seriously consider offering the grant every year. It would be a strong investment into the future of science education.
As you are applying for jobs, is the schools’ attitude towards the use of the Web in the classroom high on your list of criteria?
Absolutely! I was told in an interview recently that I wouldn’t be able to continue my blogging at that school. I politely ended the interview. It’s become so much a part of my methodology that I don’t think I could ever abandon it. Not every student has the luxury of having a home computer, but there is simply no excuse for a school to not have enough computer resources to offer their students. If a teacher has a detailed plan on how they use the Web safely in their classroom, they should be allowed to use it.
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 reception we received has motivated me to seek more ways my students can directly interact with practicing scientists. I also want to have my students more involved in participating in online conversations with scientists outside of just our blog. Some of them already do that, but I’d like to see more of them doing so. For example, I’d like them to have a journal club and discuss a paper on PLoS.
It was so nice to finally meet you in person and thank you for the interview (and say Hi to all your students). I hope to see you again next January.
It was wonderful to meet you as well! See you in January!
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Stephanie Zvan of the Almost Diamonds and Quiche Moraine blogs and co-moderator of the session on Science Fiction on Science Blogs, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I have one of the least scientific backgrounds of the people attending SO’09. What background I do have is in the social sciences, which makes me even more of an outlier. I have a degree in psychology that taught me a remarkable amount about research design, however, and I’ve never really gotten over that. In fact, it kept me from following my intended path of becoming certified for counseling. It turned out there just wasn’t any good evidence that most counseling had any lasting effect (which has since changed).
Aside from that, well, I’m terrible at describing myself and make no guarantees of consistency anyway.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I don’t think I’ll ever be content to do just one thing, but I want to write more than I do. Writing brings in no income at this point, so it’s relegated to the sidelines more than I like. Ideally, my young adult science fiction novel will find a publisher and sell well to a bunch of kids who scream for more. We’ll see how that goes.
What is your Real Life job?
Aside from saying that I’m an analyst who works for a large corporation, I don’t talk about my job. The information I deal with is interesting enough that I see my work in the news sometimes, but ultimately, none of it is mine, and the clients I work with shouldn’t ever stumble across me online and worry that some of it might become public.
And apropos of the panel on blogging and employers, that was made clear to me when I started with my company. It’s a general policy, but it doesn’t take much imagination to apply it to blogging.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m a communication geek, so it all interests me. It’s fascinating to watch the tower walls fall and see people collaborating, commiserating and debating simply because the informality of most blogs
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
For a fiction writer, some kind of dynamic online presence is a requirement these days. Well, that’s not true if your books debut on the NYT bestsellers list, but it is the standard advice. Blogging started as self-promotion for me, but I’m terrible at self-promotion. The blog didn’t really gel until I started talking about the social, political and economic topics I’m actually interested in. Discussion of contentious topics online may not be the best way to attract an audience for young adult fiction, but I’m not sure I can do anything else and still blog with any frequency or interest for others.
I’ve been on Facebook for over a year and Twitter for a couple of months. Both have ended up as a combination of news feed and free-ranging silly conversation. That suits me perfectly, but I have no idea how or whether that connects to my work beyond keeping me informed and entertained.
What are your thoughts on the never-ending debates between groups of people who are generally on the same side, but differ in one tiny detail, usually of strategy? For example, in the evolution/creation debate, silent vs. vocal atheists, or different strands of feminism (including the question of women in STEM), people who are on the same page 99% of the time, spend a lot of time aggressively arguing the remaining 1%?
This question is your revenge for me asking you about science journalism on the radio without giving you time to prep, isn’t it?
I think there’s a certain inevitability to this. There are lots of ways to talk about what’s going on, but being me, I’ll talk about it in terms of voice.
The places where I see these 1% arguments are in groups of people whose voices have traditionally been suppressed or marginalized. Feminists’, immigrants’, poor peoples’ and racial and sexual minorities’ voices have been ignored, cut off and dismissed. Atheists have been drowned out by the hue and cry the religious raise every time we’ve reminded them we exist.
Being heard has become easier and is becoming easier, but it is still not easy. Blogs, etc. give us a great place to speak, but speaking doesn’t guarantee that anyone will listen. Even the people who do read us won’t necessarily work very hard to understand us. In fact, since we’re saying unfamiliar and uncomfortable things, they have a vested interest in misreading us. We’ve all had a reader who comes along and leaves a comment that makes us say, “You thought I said what?”
99% of the time, those are the people who want to continue to suppress all our voices. The other 1%, they’re us. (Actually, considering how internet audiences self-select, it’s significantly more than 1%.) In the middle of an ongoing fight, it’s very difficult to remember that disagreeing about 1% means that we are in the same place on the fundamentals. We’re even in the same place on a great many of the details.
1% is noise. It’s nuances and connotations of words. It’s different cultural definitions of politeness. It’s varying priorities on a common to do list. It’s not restating all the things we have in common every time we want to speak. It’s shaping messages for different groups of people who still aren’t at 75%, much less 99%. It’s hauling one argument out of the common pile on any given day instead of another.
1% is not an attack, not even in the middle of a battle. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re winning and that we’re doing something very important as we win. We are, after all, trying to build a world in which it’s okay for people to disagree.
So what do we do about all the drama? Oh, hell, why ask me? Oh, right. Because I’ll answer.
Honestly, I don’t know what we do. I think the answer lies in spending some time picturing what a world in which everyone gets a voice really looks like. It’s a scary place in some ways. There aren’t any guarantees that it will make life better for any of us as individuals, although I have to uncomfortably admit that those of us with strong or persuasive voices will likely be disproportionally privileged.
One of the things that those of us who have those voices are going to have to figure out is how to balance being forceful (or charming or cutting) enough to overcome society’s dominant messages with creating an atmosphere in which the quieter and more awkward voices aren’t shouted down. I think some of the arguments that are happening are steps in the direction of figuring this out, but I don’t think anyone has the answers right now.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I was hanging out in the science fiction and fantasy blogosphere, I don’t remember where, when someone posted a link to something cool at Cognitive Daily. My degree is in psychology, and I’m fascinated by the test required to tease out effects in cognitive psych. I was hooked.
Then I discovered there was more to ScienceBlogs and much more to the science blogosphere, and I was doomed. I didn’t really discover much new through the conference, but I did get a sense of just how widely I was already reading. One thing I did get to do at the conference was tell Greta and Dave Munger this story, which it had never occurred to me I’d be able to do.
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?
Aside from meeting so many very cool people, two events stand out for me. One was having dinner with Tom Levenson and discussing one of your journalism/new media posts, The Shock Value of Science Blogs. We both started off by saying there were parts of the post we disagreed with. Each of us was talking about a different part of the post, but as we went into more depth on the topic, neither of us really disagreed with the other. That really emphasized for me the level of detail at which some of these disagreements between allies happen.
The other thing that is imprinted on my memory is standing in the hallway as sessions were in progress. The door to one session opened, a session on impact factor or open access or one of the related issues on that topic, and a young woman came out. She said she needed more coffee to deal with the discussion. She walked that direction, stopped, and turned back toward me. She wasn’t quite crying.
“I want to support open access. I think it’s important, and I want to submit to open access journals. But if I don’t submit to the big journals with high impact factors, how will I end up with a job and funding to keep researching and submitting? My adviser is young and new. How will she get tenure if we do this?”
The young always fight our revolutions, and we always lose some to the cause.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
It was lovely and invigorating and exhausting to meet you too. I hope to be there.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked my SciBling GrrrlScientist of the Living the Scientific Life 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I write the blog, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), under the pseudonym, GrrlScientist. I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the molecular evolution of parrots, a PhD in Zoology (Ornithology) and a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology (emphasis: Virology). I have bred, worked with and lived with a variety of parrot species for most of my life, specializing in the lories (loriinae), which are brightly-colored nectar-feeding parrots of the south Pacific islands. I also have worked as a research technician in cancer research and in HIV/AIDS research.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Good question. Until quite recently, I made many career plans and worked very very hard to achieve them. However, since I have been unemployed for so long, I no longer have the luxury of making any sort of plans at all, or striving to accomplish them. Now, I am quite preoccupied with simply paying my rent. I often feel as though I am writing for my life (sort of like “running for my life”).
That said, I met a friend for coffee a few weeks back, and she said that my career is writing a blog. Professional blogger. Ugh, I hate that word, “blogger”. Until she mentioned that, I had never thought about writing a blog as being a career, nor as an especially respectable career. But her observation does make sense because I work on my blog every day of the week, for 6-15 hours per day — just like when I was working on my postdoc research. My devotion to my blog keeps me from becoming overwhelmed by the worries and realities of the world.
But I no longer know what I want to do when I grow up. Except for my blog, I feel quite disillusioned and disenfranchised, and often
alienated from society. But I would like to be happy and healthy at some point in the future, though. Just to prove it is possible.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The internet is an amazing way for an intellectual to be exposed to a tremendous amount of new information and different ways of thinking, for communicating this information to others, and for testing new ideas in a public forum. I’ve always enjoyed learning new ideas and sharing this information with others. For me, part of learning includes making new information “mine” by writing about it in my own words. I’ve written for most of my life and had my articles published in a variety of magazines, newsletters and other print sources, but I’ve never before enjoyed the reach and power that I have on the internet.
At the Conference, you led a session about Nature blogging. Is there a distinction between Science blogging and Nature blogging? What did you learn from that session?
Some audience members thought of science blogging as a subcategory of Nature blogging, while others thought the reverse. My own opinion is that science and nature blog writing are separate, but often overlapping, topic areas. My conference co-host, Kevin, and I worked out a series of questions in advance, posted them on my blog and asked my readers as well as the conference participants to write responses to those questions in comments or on a piece of paper, which we later summarized and published on our blogs. After everyone had finished writing their answers, we discussed each question. But the level of passion was unexpected, and the depth and thoughtfulness with which everyone addressed these questions was really inspirational. The
seminar hour flew by, and we did not manage to get even halfway through these questions, but everyone really enjoyed this discussion, and Kevin and I certainly did, too.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Back in the days when I had a real job, I never wrote while working. Instead, I wrote during the time when I could have been hanging out in pubs. But that all changed when my postdoc funding ended before I managed to find another paying position. But five years out, if you believe that writing a blog can be a full-time job, then I’d say that blogging IS my work, since that is the one constant in my life.
I rely on social networks for two things; rapidly spreading the word about interesting blog entries and as news feeds that provide material for me to write about. Some of you may have noticed that my blogging style has changed somewhat recently — a change that I am not altogether happy about. Currently, I am learning how to balance my need to read and learn about “everything” that pops up on those social networks with my desire to write about such things for others. When I finally manage to establish this balance, my readers will no doubt be the first to know because my blog writing style will once again change to reflect this, it will become something that I am happier with.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I started writing a science blog in 2004 in complete ignorance of the existence of any other blogs on this subject area. However, I quickly found other science and medical blogs and bloggers and made a tremendous effort to join the community by commenting on other blogs and hosting science blog carnivals, and keeping up an extensive private email correspondence with other science and medical blog writers. That said, I don’t feel comfortable “playing favorites”, especially since there are so many high-quality science and medical blogs out there that I read and enjoy. (I have stopped being a prolific commenter). I did not discover new science blogs while at the conference since I am fairly well-acquainted with most of them, but I DID discover many wonderful people “out there” who write blogs about science and other topics. In my opinion, this is the real gift of conferences like this: fleetingly rare and wonderful face time.
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 work, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I have spent years hiding my blog’s existence from everyone, and denying that I was the author in those rare circumstances when asked about my blog. This created a huge disconnect between my online life and my “real” life. The overall gestalt of the conference transformed me because I met so many readers — mine and other blog readers — and found that they are so astute and intelligent. This experience added depth to my perception about blog readers in general from being “people” in an abstract sense to being warm and caring individuals — friends I have not met (face to face) — yet. That was the single most positive aspect among many about this conference that daily affects how I think about blog reading and writing and about my readers.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thank you for the interview. One of my goals for 2010 is to return to North Carolina to share in the fun and the discovery.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Eva Amsen, a participant at the 2007 and 2009 meetings, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Hello readers of Bora’s blog! I’m Eva, nice to meet you. I finished a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Toronto in December, and before that I studied Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in Amsterdam.

What is your Real Life job?
That depends… At the time I’m typing out these answers, I still have a few days left at my job at an undergraduate biology program, where I created/developed/ran a new website and did some other education support tasks. But by the time this goes live, I probably won’t be there anymore, and depending on when Bora posts this, I might even be traveling. Traveling’s not a job, though, although I do tend to plan my trips as meticulously as if I was a travel agent. But I am also doing some part-time freelance writing, so I guess that is my only consistent Real Life job at the moment. I’m also currently in the process of searching for a new full-time job. I would like to find a job in which I can coordinate communication between scientists, rather than a job doing research itself.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m fascinated by the huge shift from offline to online communication in research that happened in the 1990s. The very first people to communicate online *were* scientists: the first internet connection was between research groups! I’m of the very narrowly defined generation who got their first e-mail address as they entered university: e-mail already existed in academia, but high school students weren’t using it yet. At the time, not all journal articles were online yet, but by the time I graduated, I only *rarely* needed to physically visit a library. The web has made searching the literature so much more simple than it was before. But now, it seems to have come to a point where the web is making things *more* complicated. Should you blog? If so, who should blog? Do you publish your data online or not? Are people blurring personal lives with professional lives, and is that inevitable or do we need to separate the two again? Why are some people completely obsessed with all that has the suffix 2.0, while others just want to sit back and quietly read a paper? These are the things that I like to think about, and why I fly out to events like ScienceOnline.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Well, that depends which “work” we’re talking about. It has always been entirely separate from my work in research – blogging was just a hobby. It still is. I blog because I like doing it, and meanwhile ended up with three science blogs. (Expression Patterns, Easternblot and Musicians and Scientists)
For the job I just finished, I implemented a content management system that lets the staff update the website in a really simple way, very much *like* a blog, although we don’t allow comments on the news posts because moderation would be too much a of a time commitment. We have talked about ways to use Twitter in the classroom, but I haven’t used that in an education setting myself. For freelance writing, my blog has been crucial. I don’t think I’ve ever had a paid writing job that wasn’t directly or indirectly related to my blogging. I tend to not explicitly recommend blogging as a career move unless someone says they want a career in science writing.
As for FriendFeed and Facebook, I am very skeptical about their use in a work setting. Once you start to mix your work network with your private network, things get confusing and messy. But as I said, I’d like to find a job where I can think more about how scientists interact online, and what is *best* for them, so my opinion shouldn’t matter so much. I’m more interested in the *facts* – are researchers getting more or less work done when they use a particular service? Are they better for it, and how do you define “better”? There are a lot of factors involved in this, and I think the scientific community is starting to wonder these things more and more. I can talk about this for hours, and sometimes blog about it, so lets just move on…(related blog posts: Scientists and Web 2.0 and From the Vault – The FriendFeed Attitude).
What are some of the similarities and differences between ScienceOnline and the conference you organized in Toronto?
SciBarCamp, which I organized twice in Toronto, is based on the BarCamp/SciFoo model, where participants create the schedule on the opening night. Since we had a lot of guests who were very interested in new, web-based ways to communicate science, we did have some topics (and participants!) that also came by at ScienceOnline. But we’ve also had broader sessions, about using science to save the environment, or science in poetry, or demonstrations of Mars Rovers or hydraulic music instruments. Whatever the participants want to talk about on the first day, that ends up on the program.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Bye! And I hope to see *you* at the next SciBarCamp!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Betul Kacar of the Counter Minds 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I am Betul Kacar, originally from Istanbul, Turkey, living in the USA. I actually came here to get a PhD but now that I am graduating, I am starting to feel that I am here only to steal an American’s job. My doctoral studies structured around biochemical work on a teleost enzyme (MAO). Now I am getting ready for an exciting project for my post-doctoral work: “resurrecting and evolving 4-billion year old proteins”. Interested? More can be found here.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I don’t want to be a grown-up when I grow up. That said, I don’t want to lose my ambition and passion for scientific research and I think that is possible if one has the curiosity and courage of a child.
But if you insist, I want to see the Earth from a space shuttle that is headed to Mars.
What is your Real Life job?
Well.. I spend my day time in the lab doing research but I guess people no longer consider academia as real life. Therefore, in my -other- life I dance & teach tango. I am also a volunteer for the IRC (International Refugee Committee). Many refugees come to the US and they need help in many ways, if you’d like to help see this .
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am learning. Nothing excites me more than new ideas and thoughts. Therefore through blogging I think I found the right place for me. Not that I get hundreds of hits everyday, but it is just nice to feel a part of the club, plus, all the interesting people (like you) I got to meet. Some people from Turkey reached me through my blog, and now I am writing articles for a popular science magazine called NTV-Bilim in Turkey. So yes, blogging does open you new doors and raises opportunities. One shall not underestimate the power of the Web.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I have friends who read my blog.. well at least they tell me they do so. My graduate advisor wanted me to keep my work limited to publications therefore I have not been able to write on my project details on the blog. I try to write some real-time campus happenings, that way when people see me around, they share their comments and thoughts. Mostly fun. These days I can not blog as often due to my dissertation writing but I promise to strike back starting August. — I don’t use Twitter.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
My dear friend and collegue, Karen Ventii PhD (science to life), introduced me to the blogging world. I am very glad she did. I like to communicate and I like doing experiments, however laboratories are not the perfect place to be talkative (learned the hard way). Blogging helped me to release my words, my thoughts and everything else that I could no longer keep to myself.
This year was my first time at a SciBlogs Conference, and I had limited time, so I tried to read as many name tags as I could and go talk to sciblings. Therefore I had a lot of “oh so, this is him/her” moments, some disappointing, some surprising but always fun. I got to meet Stephanie Zvan for instance, after reading and following her blog for so long, her blog name has become like a brand in my mind. I called her “almost diamonds” for a while then switched to her first name eventually (I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a weirdo)
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 have never thought of the copyright issues or the problems that I might encounter with my employee based on the things I put on my blog. Conference made me realize that my blog is not my secret diary, it is out there and people actually read it. I was more careful on what I put or say in my blog afterwards, though I am still working on it. Like, one way to control myself is not to write when feeling too emotional or frusturated so to not regret later – and for a Mediterranean, that is a challenge.
Eh, I know! Mediterranean myself. Was there an event that marked your first year at blogging?
Definitely, blogging helped me to make a voice on Turkey’s censorship of evolution. I even made it to the news in Turkey. So instead of sitting at home and being frusturated on my own, it was a good feeling to be actually doing something. It was also amazing to see how evolution can gather so much attention on one’s blog! Some creationist was threatening me and he even told me to behave (or else). A lot of action and drama for a small blog, right?
After all I feel happy with the crowd I gathered. I always feel happy when a new reader stops by. I have no big ambitions on blogging (like being a blogging super star), as I said earlier, having fun and learning new things: priceless.
What is your favorite ice-cream flavor?
Vanilla
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
My pleasure Coturnix, thanks for all the fish (and baklava).
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Dr. SkySkull of the Skulls in the Stars 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
First, the name: I seem to have evolved many different aliases over my time in the blogosphere! My usual moniker is simply “gg”, though I am occasionally referred to by my blog title, “Skulls in the stars”. A friend of mine somewhat sarcastically started referring to me as “Dr. SkySkull”, as well, and I’m rather fond of that title.
With the name out of the way, I can say that I’m an assistant professor of physics at a Southeastern University. More specifically, I am a theoretician with an emphasis in “classical optics”, which means that I am more interested in the wave properties of light than the quantum-mechanical particle aspects of light. I actually started my career in experimental particle physics as an undergraduate, and made the change in grad school. There’s an amusing story behind the change that I’ve promised to tell on my blog at some point…
What is your Real Life job?
As a faculty member, I’m required to do research, write grants, teach courses, supervise graduate students, and help keep the department running. I’m also currently working on an optics-related textbook, which I’ll explain more about when it’s closer to being done!
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Well, hopefully “growing up” includes getting tenure, which I’m up for this year! Other than that… heck, I never know what will interest me next. I jump out of airplanes, play guitar, and ice skate as hobbies. There are certainly days when any and all of those appeal to me more than academia!
In all seriousness, though, I really love my job. Doing scientific research, and trying to educate people about it, is a blast, and I hope to keep at it for a long, long time.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I really like the fact that the Web opens up a direct line of communication between scientists and the general public. If a member of the public had a science-related question in times past, the best they could do was seek out a popularized book on the subject and hope that the explanation would suffice. Now that same person can find an answer in a (free) science blog post, and can ask follow up questions directly to the author.
With that in mind, all of my science blog posts these days are written primarily with an eye towards a non-technical audience. I work very hard to try and explain concepts without mathematics and in a manner that would be understandable without a major science degree.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
As it stands, blogging does not directly figure into my work. It does provide many indirect benefits for my research, though. For one, blogging provides an additional motivation to keep current in the scientific literature. When I read journals now, I’m not only looking for research relevant to my own but also for good blog-fodder.
Blogging also pushes me to read, and understand well, topics outside of my immediate area of expertise. I’ve found that trying to write a post on a subject, especially for a non-technical audience, forces me to learn the material at a level much deeper than I otherwise would have bothered.
My ‘history of science’ blogging has also proven unexpectedly beneficial to both my research and teaching, but I’ll say more about that in a moment!
I haven’t used any of the social networking resources in my work at all. I use Facebook, but purely as a means to keep up with distant friends and family. Twitter is something I can never see myself using – I give myself heartburn enough trying to blog several times a week, I can’t even imagine posting several times daily!
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I still can dictate exactly when and how I was drawn into the science blogosphere! I read Al Franken’s book “Lies” when it came out in the first Bush term, and that made me a fan and a regular listener of Air America Radio in its early years. From there, I got turned on to many different political blogs. Somewhere along the way, there was a reference to Pharyngula, which put science blogs on my radar. I started there, found myself drifting over to Science After Sunclipse, Good Math, Bad Math, and Uncertain Principles, and I was hooked from there.
It’s really hard to pick favorites, because I like so many and visit them regularly! Many of my favorites are curiously not even in my field: Neurotopia, Laelaps, Magma Cum Laude, Science After Sunclipse, Swans on Tea, Cocktail Party Physics and White Coat Underground are just a few.
I started reading White Coat Underground after meeting PalMD at the Conference. Neurotopia I was already familiar with, but started reading much more regularly after getting a chance to hang out with the uber-cool Scicurious. I met Tom Levenson at the Conference and now regularly check out his Inverse Square Blog.
You run the Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival – can you explain what is the motivation for doing this, what is the goal? Why are you drawn to history and why do you think others should as well?
The carnival began almost by accident! I’ve always had a significant respect for the history of science, which was instilled in me by my Ph.D. advisor, but I never really expected to make it one of my big “things.” I try to be very thorough in my science posts, however, and I found myself hunting down some very old, classic papers in an introductory post on how the speed of light is measured. In April 2008, I thought it would be fun to “challenge” other science bloggers to go and read a classic paper in their own field. I was expecting a few people to pick it up, but surprisingly (and in no small part due to A Blog Around the Clock), lots of people decided to pick up the challenge.
I realized that lots of bloggers have at least some interest in blogging about historical topics, and it seemed natural to have a central “focus” for their efforts – hence, the carnival. Overall, my goal is to promote an understanding of the history of science amongst both scientists and the general population – and that understanding can be beneficial to both groups.
There are a lot of interesting stories in the history of science, and those stories – and the people behind them – can help humanize science in the eyes of the public. Too often scientists are viewed as humorless curmudgeons working alone in some dark lab on scientific minutiae. Historical tales such as Tom Levenson’s new book Newton and the Counterfeiter can counter that perception – who could have imagined Isaac Newton matching wits with a crime-lord!
As an educator, I find that understanding the historical origins of a discovery helps immensely in explaining it to a class. In physics, at least, we tend to highlight the major breakthroughs but leave out a lot of the “connecting tissue”. This can give students a misleading view of how science is actually done and make it look much more mysterious than it needs to be. Also, fun little historical anecdotes can make the class a lot more fun!
As a researcher, my historical readings give me a better understanding of how major discoveries are made, and what sort of “mental blocks” kept other researchers from making them. What distinguishes an Einstein from a less successful researcher? There’s no easy answer to that, but one can partly see the oversights of Einstein’s contemporaries by reading the old journals.
It is also fascinating to see how scientific discoveries percolate their way into the popular culture. I also blog about classic weird fiction on my blog, and shocking discoveries such as quantum mechanics and relativity made their mark on the fiction of the time. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, was a voracious science reader, and the weirdness of Einstein’s relativity permeates much of his writing.
You led a session about History of Science online. What did you learn from running the session?
One indirect thing I learned from it was how wonderfully democratic blogging is! As a professor, I was sharing the stage with a graduate student (Scicurious) and an undergraduate (Brian of Laelaps), and I thought that it was great to have all those perspectives presented simultaneously! Folks like Sci and Brian are the future of science education, and it was very energizing to see their enthusiasm and hear their views.
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?
It’s hard to pin down any single event that really left a mark. Mainly, it was a lot of little things that I internalized, like the different ways that people look at science communication. One thing I’m already taking back to my job, though, is that the blogs are a powerful tool for such communication, and I’m already trying to get more of my colleagues involved.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Likewise! I’m looking forward to it!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Glendon Mellow of the The Flying Trilobite, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m yet another Canadian atheist artist-illustrator recovering goth-punk who blogs about incorrectly drawn fossil arthropods. We should have a lobby group. I grew up and live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and attended York University for Fine Arts. I’ll actually be returning to complete that degree this fall after many years away. Evolution was always an interest, but after reading River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins, I was far more inspired by that book than post-modern painting. It’s been pretty much a straight line from there to where I am now, blogging at The Flying Trilobite: art in awe of science. I’m also a contributor at the group paleo-art blog, Art Evolved: Life’s Time Capsule.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Making a full time career out of illustrating and art-making is my eventual goal. It’s getting closer all the time, and I desperately would love to illustrate a book with surreal scientific images. Perhaps for children. I’d like to work on another degree, and I’m torn between a biology undergrad and post-undergrad concept art courses. I could see myself using my management background to become an art director for a scientific group or institution.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Massive online amateur research programs like BioBlitz I think have a potential to somehow become fused with a game like World of Warcraft or maybe Facebook groups. People join WoW and Facebook groups for a sense of accomplishment and belonging -they make a statement about you- so I could see amateur research projects fusing with those in some way. That’s been on my mind since hearing GrrlScientist at ScienceOnline09 and Joel Sachs at SciBarCamp Toronto.
Relating to art, I think the quality of scientific illustration and indeed all illustration is rapidly going up. You’re competing with everyone. Artists are better at younger ages because there is a higher bar. And with something like Art Evolved, even though it’s only a few months old, we have enthusiastic, largely unpublished (thought that’s changing) artists engaging in a debate about pterosaur wings with paleontologists. That’s not something I would expect to see outside the blogosphere.
You are an artist – why is your art science-related? What motivates you and what are your goals?
People enjoy the feeling of the sublime, like you’re in the presence of something greater than yourself, and art has often dealt with that through myth and metaphor. I like exploring what new, awe-inspiring visual metaphors can be created with this wealth of real information and imagery that science gives us. Why use an image of a halo to enhance beauty in a portrait when you can use diatoms?
Your most famous picture is the Darwin Took Steps, features already in many places including the cover of Open Lab 2008. What gave you the idea for this work? What does it mean?
That Open Lab 2008 cover came out lookin’ sweet, thanks to David Ng.
The painting is about the pattern of thought the starts building a memetic structure, taking those first steps up into the idea of evolution by natural selection and through Charles Darwin’s thoughts, elevating the rest of us into that place so we can build on the idea with evidence. I could have used any amount of stairs, but I chose 5 to represent Darwin’s main lines of evidence: biogeography, morphology, embryology, and paleontology, with the last step open to represent natural selection, or the elevation of reason over dogma. That’s the type of symbolism I don’t think a viewer could get from the painting itself, but it is important to me to make sure I have a reason in mind.
The concept actually came from a much older painting I did for a never-saw-print cd cover, with “random old wise man” with a staircase head. Marrying the idea to Darwin produces a strong reaction of familiarity in people who understand his theory. I didn’t set out to create this painting to be popular, or to resonate more than my others. I just thought it was a neat drawing, Darwin Day was coming up and I wanted to try speed painting. I painted it in three hours. It’s since appeared on numerous websites, a magazine and a couple of book covers. It caused a ruckus on DeviantArt as a featured painting this year and led to a full-on argument between the science crowd and creationists.
If I can throw in a plug, I’m donating portions of the sales bearing this image to The Beagle Project, and I have cards, prints and shirts available in my Reproduction Shop. Let’s build a ship.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
The various options online can be daunting for a new artist. It’s so easy for people to rip off artwork and claim it as their own, but on the other hand, it’s an unparalleled medium for sharing images. There’s never been anything close to this in history. After Science Online I was waiting with other participants at the airport, and Henry Gee asked me if blogging had changed my life. It absolutely has. It yanked me out of a deep, lightless artistic depression. I’d been sitting on paintings for years, occasionally making something new, frustrated with work that few people I knew liked. Using the blogging platform, I can display my, um, let’s say niche artwork and still have a decent audience.
I tried liveblogging a painting for Darwin Day shortly after the conference. I burned out on it. Painting for two hours, then 20 minutes of uploading and colour-correcting the image, then painting 2 more hours…I spiralled into a strange place with that image. It felt as though I let people following down. It’s sitting in my studio glaring me.
I participate on DeviantArt, LinkedIn and RedBubble which has an excellent online print shop. Twitter has actually gotten me back into Facebook. People who’ve never commented on my blog were becoming fans on Facebook: are they lurkers, quietly enjoying the paintings? I don’t know. You start thinking about all of the eyes on you. It becomes a responsibility to become a better artist. I began posting new art every Monday as a way to discipline myself toward my blogpeeps.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
Being a Richard Dawkins fan, I really discovered blogs through links on his website, maybe 5 years ago.
Arriving at the hotel, Kevin Zelnio, Southern Fried Scientist, and Miriam Goldstein yanked me into conversation, and I let some of my imposter syndrome fade away. Karen James exudes cool. Talking with Stephanie Zvan between sessions helped me remember this was real somehow. I follow a ton of the blogs from the conference attendees. Anything in my sidebar.
You led two sessions at the conference – what did you learn from that experience?
The unconference format took the edge off, easier to be yourself. In the first session, the audience wanted to overwhelmingly move past the “two cultures” discussion about art and science – a huge contrast to the group at SciBarCamp here in Toronto in May. It hit me during the talk that maybe the distance of art and science is something you only see when standing in your own present – looking back across the decades of art past, it’s easy to see art inspired by science standing tall above its history.
I brought up what I had largely been thinking about at the time – that much of art based on scientific inspiration is somewhat parasitic, not giving much back. The group was vocal, emotional about the contribution of art to inspiring scientists. I’m still trying to absorb that.
The second session artist/scientist/force of nature Tanja Sova and I tried to lend some tips on image making. The unconference format was good, but if we do a follow-up next year, I think blogging some step-by-steps in advance, a call for potential volunteers for a step-by-step would be helpful. I also learned that the best way to close a conference with laughs is to have your volunteer tech-person accidentally pull up nudity onscreen due to a mis-typed url.
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?
Roger Harris’s session and comments from Greg Laden made me re-think my whole blog look. I changed it immediately. Follow-up email exchanges after the conference have my mind ticking about visualization.
Bora, there was so much – ! If blogging changed my life, then Science Online 09 did just as much. I have been massively discontented since leaving the unconference. Casting about for a new direction. There was a heady optimism in the attendees. The feeling of being around that many people doing what they love to do left me frustrated and hopeful that I can do the same with illustrating some day soon.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Great to meet you too!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked one of my SciBlings and friends, Peter Lipson, aka Pal MD of the White Coat Underground, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific/medical) background?
I’m a husband, dad, and internist. An internist is a medical doctor who specializes in adult health and disease. I’ve always loved science, but medicine isn’t a science as much as the practical application of science.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
Well, I’m pretty much stuck with the three roles I mentioned, being in the middle of life and all. I’d love to do more writing and more teaching, if the economics of medicine were to allow it. In addition to writing on medicine, I’ve recently started writing on fatherhood as well. Interestingly, this turned out to be both popular and controversial. Part of blogging, for me at least, is showing how real live professionals balance the personal and professional. The folks who don’t like it, well, they can get their own blog.
Oh, i also have a podcast (called “The PalCast“) that goes out a couple of times a month where I discuss many of the same issues as I do on my blog, but in a different way.
I love writing (and strangely, I include the PalCast in that) and wish being a grownup let me do more of it.
What is your Real Life job?
I have my own private practice, and I teach medical residents and medical students at a teaching hospital. I work about 60 hours a week and squeeze blogging into the gaps.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The opportunity to reach a wide audience is fascinating. Seriously, the people I’ve “met” online are interesting, smart, knowledgeable, even outside their own fields, and they’ve taught me a lot. I expected my blogging to be 1) ignored, and when i failed at that, 2) expository. It turns out that my readers know a lot and are willing to share their knowledge.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I’ve had patients discover my writing, but it’s not an integrated part of my work or home life. I do have friends who read my stuff, but not that many. I do use twitterfeed to tweet all of my blog posts. I accept my readers as friends on facebook, but I don’t use it that much. I don’t really check my friendfeed much anymore.
When and how did you discover science/medical blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science/medical blogs while at the Conference?
I didn’t know that much at the blogosphere when I started out. I believe my first post was sometime around March of 07 on wordpress (the original blog is inactive and in storage so no links). As I started to follow links, I ran into Orac’s blog (scienceblogs.com/insolence) and followed links around the medical blogosphere from there. I’ve met some terrific people, and over the last several months I’ve been posting occasionally at sciencebasedmedicine.com, a terrific blog run by David Gorski and Steve Novella about, well, science-based medicine.
I met some great people at SciOnline but I think I may have been the only med blogger around.
Many medical bloggers write under pseudonyms. You don’t (at least not any more). What made you decide to blog under your own name?
You co-moderated a session about pseudonymity on the blogs. There is still a lot of misunderstanding, including in the mainstream media, about the role of pseudonyms and the ways of building reputation online unconnected to one’s real life persona. For example, a pseudonymous blogger was recently outed by media in the UK, right after he received the George Orwell prize for journalism (forgetting that ‘George Orwell’ was also a pseudonym). Where do you see the future regarding this issue – will it resolve itself over time? What can be done to persuade people that pseudonymus bloggers are not automatically less trustworthy, or that pseudonymous does not equal anonymous? Did you learn something about it from your own session?
Nothing can be done to persuade people that pseudonymous bloggers are as trustworthy as named bloggers, but that’s life. Hopefully, the writing speaks for itself. Critics of pseudonymous blogging often have a bone to pick with the content of the blog and use the author’s identity as a straw man argument. I pretty much feel that trustworthiness is a non-issue in this regard. There are many other reasons to use a pseudonym, however. I “came out” because I realized that some day I would be outed anyway and I didn’t want to allow myself to rely on anonymity. I do still blog under a pseudonym because it’s part of my online identity—it’s associated with my writing and ideas more closely than my real name.
People who out anonymous bloggers are assholes. Still, if you’re anonymous, you’ve got to remember that there’s a lot of assholes out there.
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?
Just meeting people from so many different fields widened the scope of my reading (one of the first things I did when I got home was change my google reader subscriptions). I also got lots of ideas from sources that to me were unlikely, such as Henry Gee, gg, Salman Hameed, and many others outside of my field.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Me too. Let’s hope the economy perks up a little!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked one of my SciBlings and friends, Scicurious of the Neurotopia, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Scicurious (please, call my Sci), and I’m a grad student studying Pharmacology at a Southeastern University of Good Reputation. Every once in a while, I think I see the end of the tunnel, but it turns out I was fooling myself.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
A Mad Scientist. MWAH-HA-HA-HA. Honestly, it’s amazing how many of us didn’t know what to do with ourselves after college, and now it’s amazing how many of us don’t know what to do with ourselves after grad school. I guess I better begin thinking of that right about now, huh…it will definitely involve world domination.
What is your Real Life job?
Grad student. It’s a lot less glamorous than it sounds. I don’t suffer at all from paparazzi.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I really love learning in a wide variety, and sharing ideas with a large number of people. I love that, since beginning to read science blogs, I’ve found out so much more about my field, and expanded my knowledge base in other fields. I think it’s the spread of knowledge to both other scientists and lay people that interests me the most.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
In my real work? It doesn’t. I blog on my own time, and never on my Real Work. However, you can find me on Twitter, and I hear there’s a Facebook group as well. I love blogging and sharing information and educating, but work and blogging need to stay separate for now.
But indirectly, there’s been a massive effect of blogging on my work. My knowledge of other areas has increased exponentially, and now it seems that the instant something big comes out in my field, I know. So it’s been a positive influence, over all. And I’ve made some awesome friends and contacts.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites?
Funny, that. See, I went to this coffee shop one day and met this guy Coturnix. I hear you know him… Someone had told me that he could help me break into the world of science writing. And he told me to start a science blog. So I spent the next day or so checking out blogs, and thinking “hey! This is pretty sweet!” And thus, Scicurious was born.
Favorites? I hate playing favorites. I have to say I LOVE “What the hell is wrong with you, I’m mean, damn” because the title kills me. I go there when I’m feeling down just to read the title and laugh. Otherwise, I’ve got a LOT of blogs I read every day. Everyone has their good and bad days.
You led a session about History of Science at the conference – how did that go and what did you learn from it?
Well, I’ve never led a session on ANYTHING before, so I guess it went well for my first time! It was great to have gg and Laelaps there with me, I love those guys. Gg in particular knows SO much about the history of science, and has so much to share.
I think we started some good discussions. One question that really interested me was “why does this MATTER?!” I was kind of shocked, because I personally love history, and so it never really occurred to me that people wouldn’t think it mattered. But it did make me think about why people should blog about the history of science. After all, a lot of times it’s not easy to do, looking up and explaining old techniques. But I think we were able to show a little of WHY the history of science is important. I personally think that the history of science is necessary to explain a great deal of what goes on the modern biosciences, a lot of which can be really complicated if you don’t have some idea of the background.
It seems that blog posts on three topics – Historical Science, Weird Science, and Science of Sex – draw a lot of interest from your readers. But as you know, most of currently done science is not that sexy – how do you balance this for your audience?
ALL well-done, elegant science is sexy science! I also like to explain a lot of the more complicated topics, and try to make science understandable to a non-scientist audience. I try to convey how excited I was when I first learned about the topics, and I hope that gets other people excited about some of the “less-sexy” science as well, when it is conveyed by people who are passionate and who can explain how the heavy stuff relates to every day life. Sure, some science is funny and weird, and some of it’s not, but all of it is important and helps us to understand our bodies and the world that we live in. New knowledge is always pretty exciting.
You are the guest editor of the Open Laboratory 2009 anthology – any thoughts about it yet?
I agreed to do what now? Aiieeeeeeee!!!!
…
Well, I just hope I can do as well as the previous years have done. We’ve already got boatloads of submissions coming in, many of which look like good contenders. I’m just hoping I turn out something awesome and that I don’t go insane doing it!
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, I will say that I think there’s a lot to be said for meeting bloggers in person. When they are a disembodied series of words, it is very easy to misinterpret. There is no tone of voice on the internet And also, you can build up pictures in your head of these blogging gods, and in reality, we’re all just people. So it was very cool to meet some of the people I’ve been communicating with for ages, and see what they’re really like. Now sometimes I can even hear them talking when I read them!
I was also really impressed with the sessions on anonymity and women and minorities in science. Even though I AM a woman in science, it was something that I had never really thought about before. I have since become a lot more aware of these issues, and I’ve been reading up a lot on them as well. I hope that conversations about women and minority issues at conferences continue, I think there’s a lot left to be discussed, and there are ALWAYS more people to educate.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January. Today, I asked one of my SciBlings, Greg Laden of the eponymous 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? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
When I was young, I intended to become a priest. Since I was being raised among Jesuits and Franciscans, that would mean that I would likely be trained as an Inquisitor, and Inquisitors were learned. So I searched for books to read, and in my household there was one bible written in Ancient German, an Encyclopedia, and a collection of Biology Textbooks. I read all of them except the Bible because I could not read Ancient German.
I believe that there is a direct line from my youthful training as an Inquisitor to my present job as a Blogger.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I plan on being a retired Inquisitor.
What is your Real Life job?
I don’t talk about my real life job these days I like to think of myself as an independent scholar and a writer, and a part time blogger. I have a lot of jobs, a lot of stuff I have to do. But writing, at this moment, is the only thing I want to acknowledge. Everything else can bite me.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Good question. There is absolutely nothing related to science or communication about the web that is interesting. There is only interesting content. But there is a lot of interest from a technology point of view related to how Web 2.0/the blogosphere/etc works.
My interest is mainly in that content. I assume we can do anything with the web, anything related to communication, eventually. Web 2.0 is baby web. This will all look so silly even in just a few years. But the need for excellent, accurate, challenging and engaging content is paramount.
The web allows for communication of the form that has not happened before, but I see the current technology as doing almost as much to interfere with technology as to enhance it. On the user side of things, people in academics tend to be Luddites, wearing their ludditosity as a badge. These two things — baby technology and cultural resistance to novelty — need to change over the short term.
The Luddites will be left in the dust and Open Source technology will save us all.
With respect to the latter, I am very interested in promoting Open Source approaches as the technology of science communication, and Open Access as the structural or editorial milieu for dissemination. The proprietary models have had their chance and they have stifled rather than enhanced communication. The party is over, proprietary models! Over!
This does not mean that there is no room for commercial enterprise and even profit making, but the model that links consumer dollars to production via marketing has got to go.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social
networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
OK, now we are getting to the serious questions, I see. Blogging does not relate to my work. It IS my work. Blogging is where my voice lives these days. I’ve got writing projects that the blogging supports, in terms of my thought process and production stream. I’m a blogger, not a person who blogs. Social networks such as, for me mainly, Twitter and Facebook support, point to, enhance, underscore the blogging I do, and provide me with streams of information for my blog. Facebook in particular is also a social network that serves as a social network (as opposed to something called a social network that serves as a tool for disseminating information).
By the way, Twitter explicitly denies that it is a social network. This is in writing somewhere.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I was at a Minnesota Citizens for Science Education conference and someone mentioned PZ Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, as a good thing for life science teachers to read. I mostly ignored it for a while, because I was not really into reading blogs. Then I read through a few days worth and thought “Hey, this is a good way to write. Nice bite size bits, instant feedback, etc” (I don’t remember if I actually said “etc” but I might have.) So I started a blog, and it ran for about 10 months, when I was asked by Scienceblogs Dot Com to join them.
I don’t think I discovered any new science blogs at the conference because a) I knew about most of them already and b) before the conference I used the conference wiki to find out about more.
What I did discover is that these blogs are actually written by PEOPLE!!! Who would have thought!?!?!? One of the great pleasures, for me, which I expected to happen, was to meet some of the bloggers in person. I was especially looking forward to meeting Coturnix, and I was not disappointed. There were many others.
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?
Many things. Enough that I have to say that this was a very important conference. Much of what I learned came from the inter-session and extra-session conversations, as well as the sessions themselves. It was also great to meet in person people with whom I’ve collaborated on line. The organizers and participants in the Transitions session, Gender in Science, Race in Science, and Anonymity sessions produced a sort of Big Giant Stream of Conversation about all of these issues, which are largely related. There is positive movement here, and a lot of good is happening. I happen to also think that much of the social theory and political method being used by many of my fellow bloggers is rather mid 20th century and not as effective as it could be, and I would like to see this part of the blogosphere … well, grow up a bit, to be honest. But that is not true of everyone involved in these important political movements. And everyone, to a person, is well meaning and is contributing one way or another to the progress that is being made.
I look forward to the day when I can put up 15 blog postings in a row that have to do with gender and race and have the following two things NOT happen: 1) One or more commenters say “I thought this was a science blog, I’m leaving forever!!!” and 2) One or more fellow bloggers make a side long nasty remark about how my voice is different from theirs, and therefore, wrong. When those two things happen, or more exactly, don’t happen, I’ll know we’ll have made some advancement in this area.
At the ScienceOnline09 conference, because people were meeting face to face, we all were moving more quickly in this direction than we have on the intertubes before or since. That is important. The web is wonderful but it is not real life in this very important way. We need significant cultural evolution to happen in this regard.
Related, the ScienceOnline09 conference also demonstrated the overlap between science (= fieldwork and test tubes and stuff), politics and society. That is important.
There were a lot of pragmatic aspects of communication covered by the conference, most of which I missed because of the stream of sessions I chose. They looked good and I heard good things about them.
I also very much appreciated the conversations I had with James Hrynyshyn, Karen James, Tom Levinson, Rick McPherson, Mark Powell, Rebecca Skloot, Blake Stacey and Karen Venti, and others at Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Beer Hour and so on. I flew out with my Quiche Moraine Co-blogger, Stephanie Zvan and her husband Ben , and we were very happy to use this as an opportunity to let people know about Quiche. Also, I was thrilled that Lou FCD came up from the coast for big chunks of the conference, so I could meet my on line buddy in real life.
The one thing that surprised me the most, if I may say, is how many people at the conference had been reading the Congo Memoirs, and went out of their way to tell me that they liked them! That was nice.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope
to see you again next January.
The pleasure was all mine, and I’ll see you in January!
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
We kick off the series with the interview with Sol Lederman who gave a demo session: US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV either. I’m a techie. My education is in Mathematics and Sociology. I’ve worn many hats in the computer industry throughout the years – programmer, tech support person, writer, trainer, and consultant are some of the roles I’ve had.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I like to communicate about computers. I especially like the potential of Web 2.0. Lately I’ve been getting into building apps with Drupal, including layout and php code. So, maybe I’ll evolve into a social application builder or into a writer or consultant about these things. Or maybe I’ll do something completely different. Basically, I’m happy doing what I’m doing now and I’m in no hurry to grow up and be something else/different/more.
What is your Real Life job?
I wear a couple of hats: blogger and consultant. I do a variety of things for the US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). I blog for OSTI, I explore ways of getting OSTI resources more visibility, and I do some consulting and programming for them. I also blog about federated search for the Federated Search Blog, a blog sponsored by Deep Web Technologies. Federated search is the technology that aggregates scholarly information from the “Deep Web”; that’s the part of the Web that Google can’t crawl. OSTI has a number of federated search applications whose search is powered by Deep Web Technologies. My relationship with OSTI started with supporting some of their apps while I was working full time for Deep Web and has morphed into a consulting relationship with both parties.
What aspect of science communication, and in particular the use of the Web in science, interests you the most?
I’m very interested in how Web 2.0 technologies can bring scientists together. I’m a member of a Web 2.0 Innovation Team led by OSTI technologist Mike Jennings. I can’t speak in any detail about what we’re doing but we’re looking at ways of extending the scope of OSTI’s reach into the world of Web 2.0.
Some of your readers might not be aware that OSTI’s precursor was founded to manage information pursuant to the Manhattan Project. OSTI’s mission is “to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and the public.” So, OSTI is all about science communication and OSTI has a strong Web presence through applications like Science.gov and WorldWideScience.org.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your job? Do you have a blog and if so, will you tell us about it, your experience in science blogging? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
Blogging is a moderate part of my work for OSTI. It’s a much larger role at Deep Web. In a year and a half I built the Federated Search Blog from zero readers to over 800. I’m quite proud of that and I believe the blog has been a good marketing piece for Deep Web. Not related to any paid work, I write a Math blog, WildAboutMath.com. Mostly I challenge people with Math problems and give prizes.
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 always get good ideas about how OSTI can further its outreach at conferences. That’s why I attend. I vividly remember a long conversation with Wired blogger Aaron Rowe. He instilled the importance of using multiple Web 2.0 channels to reach the public. YouTube is just one example of how OSTI is taking that insight to heart.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thank you.
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See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.