Ignite-style talks are very, very energetic. They last 5 minutes each and the slideshow is set to automatically change slides every 15 seconds. Thus, one cannot be slow or go over time. These kinds of talks can be very funny, yet also very powerful. At ScienceOnline2010, we will have an Ignite session on Saturday night, at the Radisson Hotel during the banquet/dinner. Here is the lineup of speakers and topics: “Why Triangle is Better than Silicon Valley” – Wayne Sutton “My “Little Black Book” of Scientists I Love” – Joanne Manaster “Crowdsourced Chemistry – Why Online Chemistry Data Needs Your Help” – Antony Williams “Blogging on the tenure track” – Janet Stemwedel “Being mentored – not only for grad students” – Pawel Szczesny “Dive Into Your Imagination” – Annie Crawley “SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors” – Aaron Rowe “The Story of NanoBioTechnology” – Mary Spiro “Data mining the literature with Zotero” – Trevor Owens “Games in Open Science Education” – Antony Williams and Jean-Claude Bradley
Posted onNovember 5, 2009byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on ScienceOnline2010 – introducing the participants: parents and children
As you know you can see everyone who’s registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.
There are three parent-child pairs coming to the conference in January and all three have been here before: John and Sam Dupuis are a father and son. John is the Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library at York University and a SciBling, blogging at Confessions of a Science Librarian. I interviewed John last year after the 2008 conference. His son Sam blogs on Science of Sorts on My Mind. He came to ScienceOnline09 with his Dad and I interviewed him as well. At the Conference, John will co-moderate the session on “Online Reference Managers”. He can also be found on Twitter. Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove and Djordje Jeremic are a mother and son pair, originally from my homeland of Serbia. They both came to ScienceOnline09 and are coming back for more. Tatjana is a biologist and an artist. Djordje is a blogger and an origami artist. I interviewed both Tanja and Djordje earlier this year. At the Conference, Tatjana will co-moderate a session on “Open Access and Science Career Hurdles in the Developing world”. Kim and Patty Gainer are the veterans of all four conferences. Kim teaches English and writing at Radford University in Virginia. She also writes fantasy fan fiction. Her daughter Patty is a student at New River Community College.
Posted onNovember 4, 2009byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on ScienceOnline2010 – introducing the participants: SciBlings
As you know you can see everyone who’s registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Dorothea Salo is an academic librarian in Wisconsin who blogs on The Book of Trogool. She tweets as well. At the conference, Dorothea will co-moderate the session “Scientists! What can your librarian do for you?” and teach a workshop “Repositories for Fun and Profit”. Peter Lipson is a physician in Michigan. He blogs on White Coat Underground and Science-Based Medicine and tweets. At the conference, Peter will co-moderate the session “Privacy, ethics, and disasters: how being online as a doctor changes everything” and teach a workshop “”Podcasting 101”. Anne Jeffersonis an assistant professor of geology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte – she blogs on Highly Allochthonous. At the conference, Anne will co-moderate the session “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM”. James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist in Saluda, in western North Carolina. He blogs on Island of Doubt and appears to be on Twitter as well. Suzanne Franks, engineer and femininst better known online as Zuska, is another veteran of these conferences. Her blog is Thus Spake Zuska.
As you know you can see everyone who’s registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Sheril Kirshenbaum is a good friend, a marine biologist and a former SciBling. She blogs at The Intersection, has co-authored “Unscientific America” and written the forthcoming “The Science of Kissing”. After proclaiming she’d never do it, she succumbed to Twitter as well. At the conference, Sheril will co-moderate the session “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. Karen James is a postdoc in the Department of Botany at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. Another veteran of our conferences, Karen is the force behind the Beagle Project. She blogs on the Beagle Project Blog and her own Data Not Shown blog and is a force on Twitter. At the conference, Karen will co-moderate the session “Broader Impact Done Right” and demo the “Darwin and the Adventure – The (i)Movie”. Ashley Sue Allen, formerly the Community Content Liaison at NBC 17 ~ WNCN, is a writer and editor who now blogs on Green Grounded and Lumineux! and is on Twitter. Xan Gregg, another veteran of our conferences, works in the JMP scientific statistical software division at SAS and writes a great blog about scientific visualization FORTH GO. And he can be found on Twitter (perhaps the conference will make him more active there!) as well. Roger Harris is an independent social communications consultant and certainly has an interesting life story, combining science, writing, adventure and the Web. He has recently gone solo, with his Harris Social Media, blogs on TwitterThoughts and, as you can expect, tweets.
Aaron Rowe is a PhD student in biochemistry at UCSB and a blogger for Wired Science. I interviewed Aaron last year, right after our second, 2008, meeting.
If you see soychemist on Twitter, that’s him! At ScienceOnline2010, Aaron will do an Ignite-style inspirational talk “SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors”. Molly Keener, also a veteran of all the ScienceOnline conferences in the past, is the Reference Librarian in the Coy C. Carpenter Library at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and runs their news blog. David Whitlock is familiar to the regular readers of this blog as well as many other scienceblogs.com blogs as a frequent commenter under the nym ‘daedalus2u’. He is the Chief Technical Officer at Nitroceutic, LLC. His blog is Stranger than you can imagine and….don’t get him started on the topic of Nitric Oxide. Sarah Edwards is a chemical biologist and science writer & educator. She is Coordinating and Editing at AWIS Magazine, works as substitute teacher at Saint Mary’s School & Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, volunteers at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and blogs at Sarah’s Science. Fenella Saunders, another veteran of our meetings, is the senior editor of American Scientist, the magazine of Sigma Xi and my favourite popular science magazine. Fenella is also a co-author of Popular Science’s Space 2100: To Mars and Beyond in the Century to Come.
You can see the list of everyone who’s registered here.
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.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.
Today I’ll mention a few of the people who are traveling from afar. Fabiana Kubke is a professor of anatomy at University of Auckland (yes, birds brains! I hope we find some time to talk shop while she is here). Yes, that is Aucklans in New Zealand!
Dr.Kubke blogs on Building Blogs of Science which is also cross-posted on her SciBlogs blog.
At the conference, Fabiana will do a demo of The Science Media Centre and the SciBlogs – the first science blogging network in New Zealand (if I understand correctly, they even call each other SciBlings!).
You can also follow her on Twitter Jelka Crnobrnja-Isailovic is a professor of Biology in the Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics at University of Nis, Serbia and a professor in the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the Institute for Biological Research “Sinisa Stankovic” in Belgrade, Serbia.
At the conference, Dr.Crnobrnja-Isailovic will co-moderate the session “Open Access and Science Career Hurdles in the Developing world”. Pawel Szczesny teaches at the University of Warsaw & Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics PAS in Poland – a job that he got, among else, due who his online activity, after an experiment in freelance science.
At the conference, he will co-moderate a session on “The Importance of Meatspace: Science Motels, science freelancing and science coworking” and tell us about his new project along these lines.
Pawel can be found on his blog – Freelancing science and of course on Twitter.
While Michael Habib will travel from The Netherlands, he is not a stranger to this area, as he is a UNC graduate.
Michael works at Elsevier, developing SCOPUS and will participate in a session on “Online Reference Managers”.
He can, of course, also be found on Twitter. Enrico Balli is returning to the conference for the second time. He comes from Trieste, Italy where he works at SISSA MediaLab, a project of the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste.
Blog? Sure – here. And Twitter here.
The Program is now finalized – the schedule of rooms and times can be found here. What an incredible line-up of moderators/presenters and intriguing topics!
And if you think that making the schedule was easy….it took a couple of hours of moving the index cards around until I got the Best Possible Schedule in place:
Sorry, a little blurry, I know – taken by iPhone. But yes, each Index card had the title of a session and names of moderators on it. And I used several different criteria to try to make the least conflicting schedule. I hope it works….
Posted onOctober 28, 2009byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on ScienceOnline2010 – introducing the participants: SciBlings
Continuing with the series of posts introducing the participants – you can see the whole list here.
A couple of dozen SciBlings will be there, but here are five I picked for today: Janet D. Stemwedel (aka Dr. Free-Ride) is a Philosopher and a Chemist. She is a Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University in California and she blogs on Adventures in Ethics and Science and can also be found on Twitter.
Janet is the veteran of our conferences – one of a handful to attend her fourth, and one of only two people who did something – a talk, presentation or session – every single year. I interviewed Janet last year as well.
This January, Janet will do two things – she will give a short Ignite-style talk “Blogging on the tenure track”, and co-moderate a session titled “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. Christina Pikas is a science librarian and a PhD student in information studies at JHU in Maryland. She blogs on Christina’s LIS Rant and also tweets.
At the Conference, also a veteran of these meetings, Christina will moderate a session on ‘Online Reference Managers’.
See my interview with Christina here. SciCurious, the mysterious blogger at Neurotopia will be back this year as well. She can also be found on Twitter and she is this year’s Guest Editor of The Open Laboratory, the annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs which hopefully will be ready for sale just in time for the conference.
Read her ABATC interview as well. David Dobbs is a journalist and writer. He blogs on Neuron Culture as well as on Twitter.
He will be one of the moderators of the session “Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web” Paul Z. Myers is a Biology professor at University of Minnesota in Morris and he blogs on Pharyngula. This will be PZ’s first appearance at this meeting. He can also be found on Twitter, both as himself and as his blog’s feed.
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.
At the conference, Joanne will do a short Ignite-style talk “My “Little Black Book of Scientists I Love”, and a demo “Characteristics of Science Popularizers”. Christopher Perrien is an Internet Strategist at IBM here in the Research Triangle Park. He runs the Science In The Triangle site, has his own blog and can also be found on Twitter.
At the conference, Christopher will do a demo of science apps for iPhone – “Science and the mobile device”. Melissa Anley-Mills is the ORD News Director at the US EPA (Office of Research + Development), also here in the Triangle, where she also runs their Greenversations blog.
Melissa also tweets for EPA Research. Jennifer Montague works at BioCytics, a research and development company also here in North Carolina, focusing on personalized medicine. Lisa Sullivan is a writer and consultant. One of the developers of the MyNC project for the local NBC station, Lisa now runs her own SulComPR marketing firm, writes a blog and tweets.
As of a few minutes ago, we are full! You can see the entire list of registrants if you go and click here.
As you may have noticed, we have stopped the form at 225. The remaining 25 slots will be filled by Miss Baker’s students (and parent chaperones), the Big Speaker, a straggling moderator who is not registered yet, a couple of pseudonymous bloggers, and a few folks who sign up first for the waitlist.
To sign up for the waitlist, please use this form.
Now that registration for ScienceOnline2010 is open I intend to, like I did in the past years, introduce the participants to my blog readers in a series of blog posts.
Of course, you can check out the entire list for yourself (already at 201 people!) but I will try to provide a little more information about everyone so, if you are attending, you may be on a special lookout for someone you really want to talk to or, if you are not attending, to see what you’re missing so you can tune in virtually next January and make a firm promise to yourself that you will try to make it in person next time.
Of course, you can get even more of a flavor if you read the interviews with past participants – many of whom will be coming back in 2010 – here they are from the 2008 meeting and the ScienceOnline09.
I thought I’d start the series in a logical way – getting the four of us organizers out of the way first. So here we go…. Anton Zuiker is a veteran blogger (see how many years back you can go in his archives!) particularly interested in medical blogging, foodblogging and storyblogging. But even more, he is interested in building a community – using online tools to get people together in real life. Thus, he organized a series of monthly blogger meetups over the years, the annual Blogger BBQ at his home, a Long Table series of events (just started last month), several blogging conferences and found BlogTogether.org, a community of North Carolina bloggers and online communicators that is the official organizer of the ScienceOnline conferences.
Anton is one of the first graduates of the Medical and Science Journalism Program at UNC and is currently the Manager of Internal Communications at the Duke University Health System. If that is not enough for you – the list gets longer on his About page….and of course, you can follow him on Twitter. Stephanie Willen Brown is the director of the Park Library, the library of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC.
Stephanie’s blog is CogSci Librarian and you can also follow her on Twitter. At ScienceOnline2010, Stephanie will co-moderate the session “Scientists! What can your librarian do for you?” David Kroll is the Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Sciences at North Carolina Central University, but if you are a regular reader of science blogs, you probably know him better as Abel PharmBoy of the Terra Sigilatta blog and the eponymous Twitter handle.
At ScienceOnline2010, David will co-moderate the session “Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media.”
Oh, and you know me (and if you are here for the first time – welcome and look around – you can learn more about me on my About page and find me in various online places all linked here).
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.
A couple of weeks ago, Chritsopher Perrien invited Anton Zuiker and me to Duke Radio for an hour-long interview about science and medical blogging, science communication and education, about the ScienceOnline2010 conference (and the three preceding meetings in the series) and even managed to insert a couple of more personal questions about us ….
You can now listen to the show – just click right here….
Posted onOctober 23, 2009byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on The registration for the ScienceOnline2010 conference is now open!
The registration for the ScienceOnline2010 conference in now open!
To register, click here. Just complete the registration form and hit Enter. Registration includes a small fee that will help us make the conference as good as you expect. Thank you.
Then come back and see who has registered so far. Check out the Program (which is almost finalized – the times and rooms will be assigned soon). Get information about travel and hotel and organize carpooling and room-sharing with other attendees.
I realize it’s been a while since the last blog update on ScienceOnline2010, though bits and pieces showed up on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook over the past few weeks. You should follow the updates on the News and Updates page and also on the Blog and Media Coverage page on the wiki in order to stay up to date.
There are two new important pages on the wiki for you to check out: Travel and Hotel Information page has the relevant information (the exact rate for the hotel rooms will come shortly, probably Monday) on how to get here, where to stay, and how to get around. If you are driving in, or want to share a room, use the Carpooling and Room-sharing page to find the other interested people.
We are trying to organize an Early Bird dinner on Thursday, January 14th 2010, together with The Monti – a local organizer of storytelling events. For this occasion, the stories will have a science theme.
On Friday, January 15th 2010, there will be Food Tours at breakfast and lunch times, workshops at the PRC Training Facilities in RTP at 10am-12noon, and Lab Tours in the afternoon, followed by a dinner (and a talk) at the RTP Headquarters, co-sponsored by Science Communicators of North Carolina.
The main portion of the conference – a number of sessions and demos, will be held at Sigma Xi on Saturday January 16th (all day) and Sunday January 17th (half day). We will have a fun evening at the Radisson hotel on Saturday night with an Ignite session and a band.
The Program Suggestions page got so big, full of interesting ideas and discussions, that the wiki started balking – it refuses to save your edits. So I made a new page – Program Finalization – where I migrated only those sessions that have made some traction. All of the sessions listed on that page are either ‘set in stone’ or almost there.
The Program is essentially/almost finalized and will be completely finalized within about 10 days. After that, each session will get its own individual page where moderators and other participants can start discussions, ask questions, provide useful links, etc.
If you looked at the Volunteers page before and sent a message to us offering your time and effort, don’t despair – we have received them all, have a list of all of you and will get in touch with you soon about the ways you can help us. We appreciate everyone who did so already, as well as anyone who does so in the future – this is a community-organized conference and more people pitch in, the better.
We will open for registration in about a week or two. Sign up for e-mails in order to get notified on time. There are 250 spots (and all the moderators/presenters HAVE to be registered first), while almost 500 people showed some interest in showing up. So, faster you register, more likely you will be to get in.
There will be a small registration fee this year, to help us provide for you, in this bad economy, what you have learned to expect from us over the years: excellent food, coffee and program.
Speaking of bad economy, this is a difficult year for everybody. The conference is bigger than ever, with more moderators/presenters than ever, with many of the moderators in need of financial help to travel, and with some of our returning sponsors hurting as well. In the past years, we always managed to provide some financial help to poor students, unemployed bloggers and people traveling from very far away (including from developing world) and we are hoping we will be able to help such folks this year again. So we need more sponsors – if you and your organization can do something for us: cash, travel grants, sponsoring a meal, sponsoring the technical support (wifi, A/V, livestreaming/recording), donating swag or advertising, etc. let us know at: info@scienceonline2010.com
NESCent has already received a nice batch of blog posts submitted to their Travel Award contest. Write an evolutionary biology blogpost and send it in to them if you want to be considered for one of their two $750 travel grants for the conference – we are keeping those two spots open for the two winners.
If you blog about the conference, please use one of the logos/buttons from the Promotional materials page.
Check out some of the science/nature/medicine NC blogs as many of their authors will be attending the meeting and you will be able to meet them in real life.
You can also stay up to date with the news by following our official Twitter account and if you tweet, please use the #scio10 hashtag.
The Facebook event page gives us some indication of who (and how many people) intends to register. Check it out – if you have done so before but have changed your mind between “Attending”, “Maybe Attending” and “Not Attending” please change your choice accordingly so we can have a better idea.
Most Science 2.0 folks have realized that FriendFeed works better than blogs, Twitter or Facebook for liveblogging conferences. Thus, for live coverage of the sessions, you should join the official FriendFeed group.
It is getting close, and it is getting exciting. I can’t wait!
We are very excited to announce a new sponsor for ScienceOnline2010! It is National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Among some other ways they will help the meeting get bigger and better than ever, the good folks at NESCent are also going to help two bloggers with travel costs to the conference. Read carefully how you can get one of these two grants:
Application deadline: December 1, 2009
Are you a blogger who is interested in evolution? The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is offering two travel awards to attend ScienceOnline2010, a science communication
conference to be held January 14‐17th, 2010, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.
The awards offer the opportunity to travel to North Carolina to meet with several hundred
writers, editors, scientists and educators to explore how online tools are changing the way
science is done and communicated to the public. Each winner will receive $750 to cover
travel, lodging, and other expenses to attend the conference. In addition, winners are
invited to spend the morning of Friday January 15th interacting with scientists at NESCent,
and to attend a lunch in their honor. For more information about ScienceOnline2010, visit: http://www.scienceonline2010.com/index.php/wiki/index/.
To apply for an award, writers should submit a blog post that highlights current or emerging
evolutionary research. In order to be valid, posts must deal with scientific results appearing
in 2009. Posts should be 750‐1500 words, and must mention the NESCent contest.
Two recipients will be chosen by a panel of judges from both NESCent and the science
blogging community.
Please send your name, contact information, the title and date of your blog post, and a
URL to travel.award@nescent.org.
Winners will be notified by December 15th, 2009.
The purpose of this contest is to encourage the best of evolutionary writing on the Web.
The awards are sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center an NSF‐funded
research center operated by Duke University, North Carolina State University and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Known by its acronym NESCent, the center’s
goal is to promote collaborative, cross-disciplinary research in evolutionary biology.
For more information about the center, visit www.nescent.org
***********************
Contact either of the program managers for more information about the contest:
Robin Smith
Phone: 919‐668‐4544 Email: rsmith@nescent.org
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
2024 W. Main Street, Suite A200 Durham, NC 27705
NESCent logos are available for download at: http://www.nescent.org/about/nescent_logo.php
Anton and I will be on the radio, WXDU Durham Duke University Radio, tonight at 7pm. We will be interviewed by Christopher Perrien about ScienceOnline2010, science blogging, etc. This is a part of the Science In The Triangle series and the podcast will be available on iTunes early next week.
Just a few updates on the progress in the organization of ScienceOnline2010 to those of you who do not follow me (or scio10) on Twitter.
The main event – the actual sessions of the conference – will be held, like last two years, in the beuatiful building of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society (and publisher of American Scientist). The main conference program will occur on Saturday, January 16th and half of Sunday, January 17th, 2010. Breakfast, lunch, tea and coffee will be catered there on both days.
As we did every year, we will have an Early Bird Dinner on Thursday night. This is usually a smaller affair – the Early Birds are usually people who fly in from distant parts of the globe (and this year we expect many of those, including people from Poland, Italy, Serbia and New Zealand). Some of the locals also join in for an evening of good food and fun. We are thinking of making this even more fun with a special event – we’ll keep you posted about that later (it’s a secret for now).
Friday will be a busy day. Guests will be arriving throughout the day, but those who come early enough will be able to sign up for a variety of activities.
There will be Food Tours at breakfast and lunch times. Remember Coffee Cupping last year? We’ll do more things like that.
There will be Lab Tours in the afternoon (with probably more choices this year as well).
Hands-on workshops and tutorials that may require you to bring in your laptops will be offered on Friday late morning at the PRC center of RTP – if you are interested in either teaching or attending one of these, let me know (or add your name to the bottom of the Program page). Which topics? Start a blog, learn to make podcasts, learn how to make good videos, build your own social network or use the existing ones, paint your own images, then use your new skills during the conference and post the results online for other participants to see.
Friday night and Saturday night events are still in the early planning stages, but at least one of these will happen at the gorgeous new Headquarters of the Research Triangle Park, our new partner and sponsor of the conference. There is likely to be a talk by a prominent speaker on one of these two nights, while on the other night we’ll probably have an Ignite session (do you want to do one?) and perhaps even a local band! And on both nights there will be good food, wine and/or beer, and opportunity to meet local scientists, science journalists and bloggers and get to know more about RTP and all the cool science and tech happening in the area.
Registration will be capped at 250 participants. Even this number will make Sigma Xi start bursting at the seams but if everyone’s in a good mood, we’ll be fine. So far, about double that number has showed interest in coming to the conference so there will be feisty competition for those 250 slots, we expect.
Thus, we will make sure that speakers/moderators/panelists/presenters get registered first. We will open for registration later than last year (late October) when people have a better idea if they can truly come or not. We will have the Program pretty much set up and public by then so you can see exactly what you can expect. And we will ask for a small registration fee (graded according to employment status or something) to ensure that only dedicated travelers and local participants actually register (i.e., nobody registers and then does not show up, leaving serious contenders on the waiting list).
We are also working hard on making sure that there is plenty of bandwidth for all the participants to be able to go online at the same time, to have some or all sessions (moderators permitting – some are pseudonymous) live-streamed and recorded, and to have a portion of the conference also paralleled in SecondLife. Thus, even those who cannot be present in person will be able to participate virtually in parts of the conference.
If you or your organization are interested in sponsoring an aspect of the conference (a meal, an event, a tour, travel-grants for students, etc.) please let us know.
Sign up here to receive advance notice about registration and other conference updates.
Add ideas for the program at this page.
Follow us on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook for RealTime news and updates.
I know everyone in the sci-blogosphere is swooning over Carl Sagan. But as a kid I never cared much about him – I usually fell asleep halfway through each episode of ‘Cosmos’. But I would not miss for anything an episode of ‘The Underwater Odyssey of Commander Cousteau’ with Jacques-Yves Cousteau. That was breathtaking. And what he and the crew of Calypso did was truly ground-breaking, both in terms of scientific discoveries and in terms of under-water filming. And those discoveries and breakthroughs were shared with us, the audience, in an intimate and immediate manner.
That was a long time ago. The techniques of under-water filming pioneered by the crew are now probably considered to be ‘nothing special’. And I bet half the crew of Calypso were cameramen and sound engineers and lighting engineers and video mixers and other TV and movie professionals.
Can’t do that any more. Or rarely, with a huge cost, only on a very limited number of voyages on very large ships.
But what one can do, even on vessels much smaller than Calypso, is to have an embedded reporter. Not an old-timey one, but a modern reporter: someone who can search the Web for information, who can write, and blog, and tweet, and take and post photographs, and record and post audio podcasts, and record and post videos, all without help from any professional engineers, using small portable digital equipment and, most importantly, doing it in nearly Real Time, not after the ship docks after the voyage.
One of those new-style embedded reporters on a research ship is Lindsey Hoshaw. I was alerted to her by a tweet by Jay Rosen on Saturday. How did she get to do that?
She is a Stanford graduate in environmental journalism who was interested in the Pacific Garbage Patch and she put her proposal on Spot.us and asked people to help her raise the necessary funds:
I’ve been offered a space aboard the ship as the only journalist to chronicle this voyage. My enthusiasm for this project is only surpassed by the amazing opportunity I’ve been offered by The New York Times to publish an article and accompanying photos of my journey.
The Times has never written extensively about the Garbage Patch and my multimedia slideshow and article will be the first of its kind for the newspaper’s website.
As a recent graduate of Stanford University’s communications program, I have a background in environmental journalism. I have produced podcasts, audio slideshows and videos about environmental issues in the Bay Area and I have been studying the Garbage Patch for the past three years.
From their side the New York Times did not promise they’ll carry the story, but appear quite inclined to do so if the quality of her work is good:
LINDSEY HOSHAW, a freelance journalist in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to sell a multimedia slide show and maybe an article to The Times about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of floating plastic trash caught in swirling currents in a stretch of ocean twice the size of Texas.
But first, she has to get there. To help finance a $10,000 reporting trip aboard a research vessel, Hoshaw has turned to Spot.Us, a Web site where reporters appeal for donations to pay for their projects. If she can raise $6,000 before the September departure date — so far, only about $1,600 has come in — she will take out a loan for the rest, she said.
The Times has told Hoshaw that it might pay about $700 for the pictures, more if it also buys a story.
To some, this is exploitation — the mighty New York Times forcing a struggling journalist to beg with a virtual tin cup. But Hoshaw does not think so. To her, it is an opportunity she cannot pass up — a story she has long dreamed of, and a chance for a byline in The Times. To David Cohn, the founder of the nonprofit Spot.Us, it is a way for the public to commission journalism that it wants. For The Times, it is another step into a new world unthinkable even a few years ago.
She got on the ship today! You can follow Lindsey Hoshaw’s trip on Twitter (which she wisely separated from her personal account) and on her brand new blog.
You can follow her voyage on the Facebook page as well, where she also wrote:
What does this all mean both for Spot.Us and for the potential future of journalism? We would never claim to have answers, but we do have theories.
Every pitch on Spot.Us is defacto a collaboration. At the very least it is between the reporter and the community of supporters.
But often news organizations get involved. Sometimes we get TWO news organizations involved. In the future – I hope we can get THREE news organizations to collaborate around a single pitch.
We are producing a custom CMS that is based around the idea that “collaboration is queen.” It is the acknowledgment that no single news organization can do everything and that it is okay to “link to the rest.” It requires a new level of transparency and honesty in our reporting.
On Rebooting the News #24 this morning (I am assuming that all my readers listen to the show religiously every Monday), Jay and Dave talked about her as well:
On September 8, Lindsey Hoshaw set sail for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge pool of debris out in the middle of the Pacific that’s been known about for a while but rarely reported on or photographed. Her trip has been funded by users who think it’s an important venture. That happened at spot.us, the crowd-funding site for investigative journalism created by David Cohn, who used to work with Jay on NewAssignment.Net. (Background: See Lindsey’s original pitch in July 2009 and Jay’s original post for NewAssignment.Net back in 2006.) The New York Times has agreed to run her account and photos if they are up to Times standards. Meanwhile you can follow along on Twitter by adding thegarbagegirl.
That’s the re-booted system of news at work, already at work!
Dave: we’ve had reporters there before. Anyone who sailed by the Garbage Patch could have been our correspondent on the scene. We just have to teach them to do it.
Jay: it’s unlikely we’d be able to fund a reporter and a photographer and a videographer, which is why it’s important for journalists to be able to do multiple things.
Now you may say “Hmmm, that sounds familiar….didn’t I hear something about this before?” And yes, you did.
Another research vessel just returned from the Pacific Gyre where the crew studied the Garbage Patch. That was the Seaplex expedition, led by Miriam Goldstein, a well-known ocean blogger from the Oyster’s Garter blog. Miriam too, separated her personal Twitter account from the expedition account (I don’t actually know who from the crew tweeted from the official account). And she also blogged about it on the official Seaplex blog. So that crew also had an ’embedded reporter’ of sorts – Miriam herself.
But take another look at the crew. Notice something? Miriam was not the only experienced blogger there. Or even the most experienced as a reporter. There were three other people there whose main purpose was to record and report from the trip – the Project Kaisei people, who also used their own Twitter account. One of them is Annie Crawley, founder of DiveImagination who also tweeted from the voyage.
So it seems all these trips have young journalists embedded as reporters, or as parts of the scientific crew, using all the modern communication technologies to report from the voyages in real time as well as to prepare more robust reports afterwards.
Oh, did I say that’s all? No, Lindsey Hoshaw is not the only person with reporting and blogging experience on that ship. There is also Bonnie Monteleone on board. Bonnie is a blogger on The Plastic Ocean (associated with the organization of the same name (hat-tip to North Carolina Sierra Club Blog):
UNCW’s Bonnie Monteleone and Jennifer O’Keefe, Director of Keep America Beautiful- New Hanover County, will represent North Carolina’s passion for the ocean by going out into the Atlantic Gyre, followed by Monteleone joining Algalita Marine Research Foundation into the North Pacific Gyre. They will be taking samples to quantify pelagic plastics found on the oceans surface, collecting surface feeding fish to necropsy for ingested plastics and bringing national awareness to the issues of man made debris entering our oceans. Most of this research is personally funded and why they need your help.
So Bonnie, who is both a student at UNC-Wilmington and staff in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry there, will be able to do a direct comparison between the Atlantic and Pacific Garbage Patches. And write and post videos from both expeditions.
Ah, what a tangled web! And the distinctions are getting blurry – who is a scientist, who is crew, who is journalist? Everyone is a little bit of everything these days. The journalists are surrounded by scientists – a constant source of information – and scientists are surrounded by journalists – a constant source of questions. They both also help with the daily ship routines (there is no space on small ships for freeloaders – hoist the sails!). And they all report from the voyage, each in his or her own way, some focusing more on the science, others more on the human connection, both at least some on the personal experience.
Now, if you’ve ever been to one of the ScienceOnline conferences (e.g., last year, or the year before….), you know that Ocean Bloggers are a jolly bunch – they come to the conference and what do they do for three days non-stop? They sing Sea Shanties! But they also do the best, most creative and most informative sessions! They are totally at the cutting edge of the new online technologies and many of them are awesome writers. Karen, Craig, Kevin, Miriam, Mark, Jennifer, Rick, Allie, Christie, James, Jason, Sheril, Andrew and David and many others are all amazing bloggers! And very active on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and elsewhere online (it is entirely possible that Karen tweets more times per day than I do!).
And I know that most of them are planning to come to ScienceOnline2010. I have learned that the best thing to do with the Ocean Bloggers is to give them an one-hour time slot and let them loose. They don’t need no guidance from me – they are much more creative than I am and ‘get’ the spirit of the Unconference better than most. They’ll plot something in secret and surprise us all right there and then.
Also, what I did as soon as I saw Jay’s original tweet was start following Lindsey Hoshaw on Twitter. She followed me back so we could exchange Direct Messages….and, she’ll also try to come to ScienceOnline2010. Now I just need to catch Bonnie (she is in Wilmington, an hour’s drive from here – perhaps she can carpool with Anne-Marie) and Annie Crawley and all the ’embedded reporters’ and bloggers from all of this summer’s Garbage Patch voyages will be there. So perhaps they can all get together and tell us all about it – compare notes. Each one of them came to this with a different background, with different skills and experiences, with different goals. What did they learn about modern journalism out at sea?
Or perhaps they can put all of their stuff together – all the tweets, blog posts, photographs, podcasts, videos and polished articles (or at least links to polished articles if they are published in corporate media, e.g., New York Times) can, perhaps, be placed in a single online spot which we can then all link to and boost the Google rank so people who search for the ‘Garbage Patch’ find it up high in their searches. Perhaps they can plot how to do it at their session. Or, knowing them, they can do it quicker and use the conference to unveil the site to the world.
Remember what Lindsey Hoshaw wrote (above):
What does this all mean both for Spot.Us and for the potential future of journalism? We would never claim to have answers, but we do have theories. Every pitch on Spot.Us is defacto a collaboration. At the very least it is between the reporter and the community of supporters. But often news organizations get involved. Sometimes we get TWO news organizations involved. In the future – I hope we can get THREE news organizations to collaborate around a single pitch. We are producing a custom CMS that is based around the idea that “collaboration is queen.” It is the acknowledgment that no single news organization can do everything and that it is okay to “link to the rest.” It requires a new level of transparency and honesty in our reporting.
Today, we are all Jacques-Yves Cousteau. And all of the filming crew.
Last year some of the ocean bloggers were involved in the session with the title “Hey! You Can’t Say That!”. Perhaps next year they can call the session “Oh, You Bet I Can Talk Trash!” or “Blogging Garbage” or, like this post, “Talking Trash”….
Whatever they decide to do, I am looking forward to the result, and to their session. And the Sea Shanties the evening after it.
We are off to a good start.
We now have a Twitter account I started last night (yes, that is a Saturday night) and already at 35 followers (also follow the #scio10 hashtag).
Our FriendFeed room has 30 subscribers.
On our Facebook Event page, 96 people indicated they are ‘Attending’ and 174 are ‘Maybe Attending’, with majority of both groups (unusual for Facebook) quite serious about trying to really get here.
And the activity on the wiki is already lively – the Program Suggestions page is already full of great ideas – go there and discuss them and add more.
It is official – ScienceOnline2010, the fourth annual conference on science and the Web, will be held on January 15-17th, 2010 in the Research Triangle Park area (the exact location to be announced).
Please join us for this three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science.
* Please take a minute to register (if you were registered last year, use that password) for the wiki.
* Log in and add ideas for the program at this page.
* The registration for the conference itself will open in late Fall 2009. Sign up here to receive advance notice about registration and other conference updates.
(Note: Conference registration is not the same as member registration for editing this wiki, or vice versa – they are two different platforms. To contribute your ideas to this planning wiki, please go to the blue strip on the top of the page and register.)
* If you or your organization are interested in becoming a Sponsor, or helping in other ways, please contact us at info@scienceonline2010.com
* Keep informed about the organization of the conference at the News and Updates page.
* Keep up with the blog and media coverage here.
* This is a collaborative and community conference — we need you to participate now to help us make this a successful, fun and educational event. Please volunteer to help.
* This is a conference to explore new ways in communicating scientific exploration. Our conference addresses a variety of issues and perspectives on science communication, including science literacy, the popularization of science, science in classrooms and in homes, debunking pseudoscience, using blogs as tools for presenting scientific research, writing about science, and health and medicine. In addition to being an internationally known hub of scientific and biomedical research and education, North Carolina has numerous science blogs written by a wide variety of people – see this listing of Science bloggers located in North Carolina (and let me know if there are errors or omissions).
* If twittering, use the hashtag: #scio10 (use the same tag on other services, e.g., Flickr, YouTube, etc.).
* Join the conversation in our FriendFeed room.
* Join the Facebook event (this helps us with estimating the number and composition of potential participants)
* Help us spread the word: in person, by phone or e-mail, on social networks and on blogs and websites. If online, please use our Promo materials:
A Blog Around The Clock 