Wow – this was hard! I could have had at least Top 20 instead of Top 10 (but you’ll find them all listed down there anyway)…
Blog of the Week:
Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog is a blog by Tanya Khovanova, a Visiting Scholar and Research Affiliate at MIT, a 1976 gold medalist (and 1975 silver medalist) at the International Mathematics Olympiad. What she does the most (though there is occasionally other stuff there) is to pose difficult (and some not to so difficult) mathematical problems and puzzles for her readers to try to solve in the comments. Go ahead and give it a try yourself!
Although only two years old and previously unrecognized by the scientific establishment, Global Draining (GD) has now become a widely accepted theory. GD states that sea level is falling not rising (Southern Fried Science, 2010a). Current rates of GD indicate the entire world’s ocean will be empty by 2026 (Southern Fried Science, 2010a). Local-scale observation of in situ draining combined with a robust theoretical model firmly place the rate of draining at 40 Gigatons of water per year (Dr. M, 2010). It has been argued that both one and multiple holes occur in the ocean floor that allow for GD (i.e. the monoclavis versus polyclavis hypotheses via McCay, 2010; Southern Fried Science, 2010b). However, the impacts and causes of GD are not clearly understood. Despite this, GD is a fundamental tenet of nearly every facet of science and likely correlated with many aspects of biology, economics, sociology, religion, and politics. For example, GD is likely to lead to massive die offs of sharks and reduce global atmospheric oxygen levels (Shark Diver, 2010)…
In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in the history of language…
My first child was born just about nine months ago. From the hospital window on that memorable day, I could see that it was surprisingly sunny for a Berkeley autumn afternoon. At the time, I’d only slept about three of the last 38 hours. My mind was making up for the missing haze that usually fills the Berkeley sky. Despite my cloudy state, I can easily recall those moments following my first afternoon laying with my newborn son. In those minutes, he cleared my mind better than the sun had cleared the Berkeley skies…
I write mostly about neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. That means I spend most of my time talking to and writing about men.
In May of 2011 (chosen arbitrarily just because it was a year ago and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about this gender gap then), 89 percent of my phone interviews were with men.
Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet…
Is it a paradox to hate your own species? Is such a feeling the product of a broken and conflicted mind? Or could it perhaps be the signature of psychopathy? Every day these questions run through my mind and I feel guilty. Why? Well, because I do hate my own species. Homo sapiens is terrible, and I’m surprised more people don’t recognise this…
…In January 2000, the mass media ran several stories about Robert Smith, a surgeon at the Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary who had amputated the legs of two patients at their own request and was planning a third amputation. The news stories incorrectly described the patients as suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder. They further stated that the director of NHS trust running the hospital at which Smith works described the amputation of healthy limbs as “inappropriate”; since then, no British hospital has performed a voluntary amputation…
…I suppose one could hook up the computers directly to the experiments and have them generate models, test the models against new observations and then modify the experimental apparatus without any human intervention. However, I am not sure that would be science. Science is ultimately a human activity and the models we produce are products of the human mind. It is not enough that the computer knows the answer. We want to have some feeling for the results, to understand them. Without the simple models, Mickey Mouse science, that would not be possible: the big news made ever so small…
In popular culture, paleontologists are like Indiana Jones. Rugged men wandering through rocky deserts, wearing wide-brimmed leather hats and multi-pocketed khaki vests. Rock-hammers hang nonchalantly from their belt-loops, maps and note-pads protrude from pockets. On a whim, they brush aside some sand to reveal a ferocious skull and massive vertebrae, and then they puzzle out the mysteries of dinosaurs just by staring at the rocks. But in contemporary science, paleontologists are biologists, computer programmers, and engineers…
Special topic: Scientists, Journalism and Outreach
Eh, the whole week started with The Unwritten Rules of Journalism by Adam Ruben and then the blogosphere exploded – see for yourself:
Wi-Fi and Amtrak: Missed Connections by Ron Nixon – obviously written by someone who’s never boarded anything but Acela, which is notorious for bad wifi. I find wifi perfectly usable on the Carolinian route of Amtrak.
Vintage Space is a blog by Amy Shira Teitel, science writer and historian of space exploration living in Arizona. She has been busy lately, contributing articles to Discovery News, Motherboard, Spaceflight Observer podcasts, Scientific American Guest Blog, Soapbox Science blog, Timeline Magazine, AmericaSpace and Universe Today, among else. Vintage Space is her writing laboratory, where she first explores topics she may subsequently expand into longer pieces for other venues. And she links to all of her articles as they go live in various places so you can keep up with her prolific output. Those of you regular readers of Scientific American blogs may remember her guest posts, and for those of you not familiar, those can give you the taste of her fascinating forays into the history of space: Sky Crane – how to land Curiosity on the surface of Mars and Apollo 1: The Fire That Shocked NASA and John Glenn: The Man Behind the Hero.
The 1850 murder of Gustave Fougnies in Belgium is not famous because of the cleverness of his killers. Not at all. They – his sister and brother-in-law – practically set off signal flares announcing their parts in a suspicious death.
It’s not famous because it was such a classic high society murder. The killers were the dashing, expensive, and deeply indebted Comte and Countess de Bocarmé. The death occurred during a dangerously intimate dinner at their chateau, a 18th century mansion on an estate in southern Belgium.
Nor it is remembered because the Comte died by guillotine in 1851 – so many did after all.
No, this is a famous murder because of its use of a notably lethal poison. And because the solving of this particular murder changed the history of toxicology, helped lay the foundation for modern forensic science. The poison, by the way, was the plant alkaloid nicotine….
…I mean Dawkins and Wilson no disrespect by calling them two among many. I trust that they would agree and would defer to others especially when it comes to mathematical models, which is not their area of expertise. If the public is going to become literate on the issues at stake—as well they should, because they are fundamental to the study of human sociality—then they will need to realize that both Wilson and Dawkins get some things right and other things wrong. Moreover, the entire community of scientists is in more agreement than the infamous exchange in Nature seems to indicate. Taking the argument from authority seriously can lead to a breakthrough in the public’s understanding of social evolution. …
…Dose-specific toxicity is indeed of paramount importance in medicine, but if you delve deeper, the common mechanism underlying the toxicity of many drugs often has less to do with the specific drugs themselves and more to do with the other major player in the interaction of drugs with the human body – proteins. Unwarranted dosages of drugs are certainly dangerous, but even in these cases the effect is often mediated by specific proteins. Thus in this post, I want to take a slightly different tack and want to reinforce the idea that when it comes to drugs it’s often wise to remember that “the protein makes the poison”. I want to reinforce the fact that toxicity is often a function of multiple entities and not just one. In fact this concept underlies most of the side-effects of drugs, manifested in all those ominous sounding warnings delivered in rapid fire intonations in otherwise soothing drug commercials…
Neuroscientists have long been banging their heads on their desks over exaggerated reports of brain scanning studies. Media stories illustrated with coloured scans, supposedly showing how the brain works, are now a standard part of the science pages and some people find them so convincing that they are touted as ways of designing education for our children, evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and testing potential recruits…
Invisibility cloaks aren’t just for Harry Potter anymore. Last year, researchers made one that cloaked things in time. Now they’ve made thousands of tiny invisibility cloaks that trap a rainbow. That’s right, 25,000 invisibility cloaks trapping a rainbow. The first question you might be asking is: why? Why does it take 25,000 invisibility cloaks to trap a rainbow? Or maybe, why trap a rainbow in the first place?
You have no idea how long I have been planning to look at the blasters in Star Wars. No idea. Finally, the 35th Anniversary of Star Wars has motivated me to complete my study (which I haven’t actually started). Here is the deal: What are these blasters? How fast are the blaster bolts? Do the blasters from the spacecraft travel at about the same speed as the handheld blasters? Why do people still think these are lasers?…
What does it mean to be a good role? Am I a good role model? Playing around with kids at home or in the middle of a science classroom, adults often ask themselves these questions, especially when it comes to girls and science. But despite having asked them many times myself, I don’t think they’re the right questions…
A Biologist went down to the coffee shop one day, because the walk out to the edge of the University campus provided some brief respite from the laboratory. Along the way the Biologist encountered an Evolutionary Psychologist, who was also going to the coffee shop, and they fell to walking together…
When I was a kid – and who am I kidding; when I was an adult too – I made fun of the science in movies. “That’s so fakey!” I would cry out loud when a spaceship roared past, or a slimy alien stalked our heroes. Eventually, my verbal exclamations evolved into written ones. Not long after creating my first website (back in the Dark Internet Ages of 1997) I decided it would be fun to critique the science of movies, and I dove in with both glee and fervor. No movie was safe, from Armageddon to Austin Powers…
Stegosaurus is undoubtedly one of the most perplexing dinosaurs. What was all that iconic armor for? (And how did amorous stegosaurs get around that complication?) Paleontologists have been investigating and debating the function of Stegosaurus ornamentation for decades, but without much consensus. The dinosaur’s spectacular plates were certainly prominent visual signals, but could they also have been used for regulating body temperature? Or might there be some evolutionary impetus we’re not thinking of?
Lost in your brain by David Dobbs – “When science writer David Dobbs is suddenly unable to remember how to drive his kids to school, he sets off on a quest to understand his own brain, and makes a shocking discovery.”
The great Pacific garbage reality by Usha Lee McFarling – “The great Pacific garbage reality. It’s not tsunami debris we should fear; it’s the trash clogging our oceans.”
Posted onMay 28, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on ScienceOnline2012 – interview with Adam Regelmann
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your background? Any scientific education?
Geographically: Minneapolis -> New York City (College, MD, PhD at Columbia) -> St. Louis (Residency at Wash U) -> Palo Alto (co-founder at Quartzy)
Philosophically: After working for many years in biomedical research labs, I became resolved to make science move faster. I believe one of the big problems in science, in both academia and industry, is a lack of a standardized lab infrastructure. We use the scientific method to think about how to test our observations, but there is no “laboratory method” for actually doing science.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I have taken a somewhat circuitous route to my current life. I started my foray into Science as a 9th grader when I told my dad “I want to work with white blood cells this summer”. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He asked one of his colleagues if I could work in her lab. She said yes, and I began my first research project – examining the protease activity of of bronchial washings from patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). I found that better nourished CF patients had less proteolytic activity in their lungs than those with poorer nutrition. I was hooked, and, I spent the remainder of my high-school summers in the lab.
After high school, I attended Columbia University in New York and continued this summer tradition, working first for a chemistry professor, and then for a microbiologist. I published my first first-author paper with the microbiologist (biochemical analysis of a divalent cation sensor protein in E. coli and Salmonella), which was a wonderful feeling. I went on to complete an MD/PhD at Columbia, and during my research years I became increasingly aware and increasingly frustrated by the inefficiencies that plague scientific research.
I couldn’t believe that it was the 21st century and one of the best institutions in the country still used excel, whiteboards, paper and fax machines to coordinate daily activities in the lab. I started working on a project to help my lab, and when other labs became interested I realized that there was an immense need here. The big idea of coordinating all aspects of scientific research through a standardized online platform thrilled me, so my programmer-friend and I launched the system, called Quartzy with the aim of advancing research by making labs more efficient.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Quartzy is a 24/7 job. Just ask my wife. I imagine a world where the pace of science is no longer dragged down by the inability to find the resources to do experiments. I would like for Quartzy to serve that purpose, which is why it’s free for scientists. I strongly believe that keeping Quartzy free is the only way for it to become the standard method for lab management. I would like scientists to be able to spend every dollar they have on actual experiments, not on lab management software.
Quartzy makes money from vendors. They can either have Quartzy host their catalogs, or participate in our marketplace, so users can buy directly from them through Quartzy. We also do some contract customization work. Over 12,000 scientists are on Quartzy. The cool thing is that as this number grows, the efficiency increases exponentially. For example, when a grad student leaves one lab and joins another, if both labs are on Quartzy the time it takes for her to start her new project is significantly lower since she’ll know where everything is.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The development of web-based tools to enhance communication in the sciences is probably the most profound advance in the last decade. It has always been odd to me that the internet started as an instrument to allow scientists to efficiently communicate, but all the cool developments sprung up in the consumer sector, leaving the sciences in the dust. Although these new science-focused tools are all still in their youth, they have the power to completely disrupt every aspect of the scientific process from actually doing experiments to publishing results to peer review. The noise to signal ratio is a little high right now, since we’re in the “Wild-west” days of this movement, but that’s also why it’s an extremely exciting time.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Absolutely positive. These networks are vital to communicating with our users, but also vital to communication in general at this point in time. Science has never been done in a vacuum, and these networks allow people to rapidly discover information that could have taken months to learn about otherwise. At first, I was overwhelmed at the prospect of using these tools in science, but if used correctly they can be a huge asset. Twitter and Facebook are especially powerful because of the size of their respective networks. If you’re a scientist right now and you’re not using at least one of these tools, you are at a significant disadvantage.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I’m not sure when I discovered them. It was probably when doing research for my PhD. Two specific blogs that I was made aware of at Scio12 are The Artful Amoeba and The Mother Geek. Also, it was super cool to meet Jonathan Eisen at the conference, whose blog I’ve followed for a while.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Because of ScienceOnline2012, I will probably become more active on google+. A lot of people were talking it up there. As far as the conference itself goes: much of the conference focused on navigating the intersection of science and writing, or how to improve your writing, which was great, but I was thinking it might be cool to invite some scientists to actually present some of their new data and see how all the science writers in the room cover the same presentations.
Over the years, Better Posters blog has become the “Go To” place to send students when they start preparing posters for their first scientific meetings. Updated weekly, on Thursdays, this blog by Dr. Zen Faulkes (who also blogs at his other two awesome blogs NeuroDojo and Marmorkrebs, as well as on the #SciFund blog) provides ideas, suggestions, underlying theory, and thorough, fair critiques of poster design for scientific conferences. It is a link I (and I am sure many others) send whenever asked what is the best resource for preparing a good poster. Zen Faulkes also has a broader category of posts about presentations in general, both oral and poster, under the Zen of Presentations tag on his other blog.
Anyone who has studied psychology or neuroscience will be familiar with the incredible case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a metre-long iron rod propelled straight through his head at high speed in an explosion. Gage famously survived this horrific accident, but underwent dramatic personality changes afterwards. In recent years researchers reconstructed his skull and the passage of the rod through it, to try to understand how these changes were related to his brain damage. Now, neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles have produced Gage’s connectome – a detailed wiring diagram of his brain, showing how its long-range connections were altered by the injury.
Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don’t replicate, but this knowledge doesn’t get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I’ve seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.” These problems occur throughout the sciences, but psychology has a number of deeply entrenched cultural norms that exacerbate them. It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results. And once positive results are published, few researchers replicate the experiment exactly, instead carrying out ‘conceptual replications’ that test similar hypotheses using different methods. This practice, say critics, builds a house of cards on potentially shaky foundations…
In 1964, the launch schedule for the Gemini program was set and it was tight. Missions with new objectives would launch every eight to ten weeks taking NASA a step closer to the Moon each time. But hardware setbacks and some surprising feats by Soviet cosmonauts took a toll on the schedule. In the first half of 1965, NASA developed a plan that would see Gemini match and begin to overtake the Soviet Union in space. It was done largely in secret and known internally as Plan X….
…The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals’ bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out….
….To devise a good layout requires some understanding of what museum visitors do, and there’s surprisingly little literature on this topic. Most of the studies of museum-goers that I’ve seen rely on questionnaires. They ask people what they did, what they learned, and what they liked and didn’t like. No doubt there are virtues to this technique, but it assumes that people are aware of what they’re doing. It doesn’t take into account how much looking depends on parts of the brain that are largely instinctive and intuitive and often not easily accessible to our rational consciousness. Was there another mode of investigation and description that would illuminate what was actually taking place?…
You’ve probably heard of the “Pacific garbage patch,” also called the “trash vortex.” It’s a region of the North Pacific ocean where the northern jet stream and the southern trade winds, moving opposite directions, create a vast, gently circling region of water called the North Pacific Gyre — and at its center, there are tons of plastic garbage. You may even have seen this picture of the garbage patch, above — right? Wrong….
I love analogies and use them often to get people to think about scientific concepts in new ways. I’ll share some of my favourite ones on the blog but today, I want to talk about Analogies Gone Bad….There is a lovely analogy to help people understand DNA code: DNA can be seen as a language…
You might notice the sting of the injection. Within seconds you’d realize you’re having trouble moving your eyes and fingers, followed by your arms and legs. If you were standing, you’d collapse. In a heap on the floor, you’d realize nearly every muscle in your body was paralyzed. Being fully conscious, your sense of panic would be rising as rapidly as the paralysis was spreading. Swallowing and breathing has become more and more difficult. Slipping into unconsciousness, your last conscious thought may well be “I am going to die.”…
The American Psychiatric Association have just published the latest update of the draft DSM-5 psychiatric diagnosis manual, which is due to be completed in 2013. The changes have provoked much comment, criticism, and heated debate, and many have used the opportunity to attack psychiatric diagnosis and the perceived failure to find “biological tests” to replace descriptions of mental phenomena. But to understand the strengths and weaknesses of psychiatric diagnosis, it’s important to know where the challenges lie….
“Plants smell,” says botanist David Chamovitz. Yes, they give off odors, but that’s not what Chamovitz means. He means plants can smell other plants. “Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their [plant] neighbor has been cut by a gardener’s shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it,” he writes in his new book, What a Plant Knows. They don’t have noses or a nervous system, but they still have an olfactory sense, and they can differentiate. He says there’s a vine that can smell the difference between a tomato and a stalk of wheat. It will choose one over the other, based on…smell! In a moment I’ll show you how….
Any fair-sized city in the United States is lousy with pigeons, hoovering up bread crumbs from public squares and head-bobbing so much they look like little Jay Zs groovin’ to some fresh beats. The favorite rumpus room of the pigeon, New York City, is thought to contain anywhere between 1 and 7 million of the flapping rats of the sky. So where are all the dead ones?
Pigeon GPS Identified by Megan Scudellari: “A population of neurons in pigeon brains encodes direction, intensity, and polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field.”
It’s supposed to hurt to think about it! by Ethan Siegel: “One of the most fundamental questions about the Universe that anyone can ask is, “Why is there anything here at all?””
Putting the ‘Fear’ in Climate Change by Paige Brown – “Do scientists and climate communicators really need the ‘scary’ headlines and alarming facts to get media coverage?”
Uncertainty overdone by Bryan Walker: “As a concerned human being I don’t want scientists to soft-pedal on that evidence.”
A Sensitive Subject, on quantifying uncertainties in modeling climate change and its impacts, by Tamsin Edwards:
Could Angry Birds lead to mass murder? by Martin Robbins: “Attempts to link last year’s Norway shootings to Call of Duty are spectacularly misguided. Moral panic about violent video games is based on prejudice, ignorance and the selective use of flawed research.”
The Facebook Fallacy by Michael Wolff: “For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.”
This is not really a new post. But it is not exactly a re-publishing of an old post either. It is a lightly edited mashup or compilation of excerpts from several old posts – I hope it all makes sense this way, all in one place. The sources of material are these old posts:
I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR.
At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even more the negative social connotations of sleep as an indicator of laziness.
Nothing pains me more than when I see educators (in comments) revealing such biases in regards to their student in the adolescent years. Why do teachers think that their charges are lazy, irresponsible bums, and persist in such belief even when confronted with clear scientific data demonstrating that sleep phase in adolescents is markedly delayed in comparison to younger and older people?
In short, presumably under the influence of the sudden surge of sex steroid hormones (and my own research gently touched on this), the circadian clock phase-advances in teen years. It persists in this state until one is almost 30 years old. After that, it settles into its adult pattern. Of course, we are talking about human populations, not individuals – you can surely give me an anecdote about someone who does not follow this pattern. That’s fine. Of course there are exceptions, as there is vast genetic (and thus phenotypic) variation in human populations. This does not in any way diminish the findings of population studies.
Everyone, from little children, through teens and young adults to elderly, belongs to one of the ‘chronotypes’. You can be a more or less extreme lark (phase-advanced, tend to wake up and fall asleep early), a more or less extreme owl (phase-delayed, tend to wake up and fall asleep late). You can be something in between – some kind of “median” (I don’t want to call this normal, because the whole spectrum is normal) chronotype.
Along a different continuum, one can be very rigid (usually the extreme larks find it really difficult to adjust to work schedules that do not fit their clocks), or quite flexible (people who find it easy to work night-shifts or rotating shifts and tend to remain in such jobs long after their colleagues with less flexible clocks have quit).
No matter where you are on these continua, once you hit puberty your clock will phase-delay. If you were an owl to begin with, you will become a more extreme owl for about a dozen years. If you are an extreme lark, you’ll be a less extreme lark. In the late 20s, your clock will gradually go back to your baseline chronotype and retain it for the rest of your life.
The important thing to remember is that chronotypes are not social constructs (although work-hours and school-hours are). No amount of bribing or threatening can make an adolescent fall asleep early. Don’t blame video games or TV. Even if you take all of these away (and you should that late at night, and replace them with books) and switch off the lights, the poor teen will toss and turn and not fall asleep until midnight or later, thus getting only about 4-6 hours of sleep until it is time to get up and go to school again.
More and more school districts around the country, especially in more enlightened and progressive areas, are heeding the science and making a rational decision to follow the science and adjust the school-start times accordingly. Instead of forcing teenagers to wake up at their biological midnight (circa 6am) to go to school, where invariably they sleep through the first two morning classes, more and more schools are adopting the reverse busing schedule: elementary schools first (around 7:50am), middle schools next (around 8:20am) and high schools last (around 8:50am). I hope all schools around the country eventually adopt this schedule and quit torturing the teens and then blaming the teens for sleeping in class and making bad grades.
No matter how much you may wish to think that everything in human behavior originates in culture, biology will trump you every now and then, and then you should better pay attention, especially if the life, health, happiness and educational quality of other people depends on your decisions.
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Recently, Lance Mannion wrote an interesting post on the topic, which reminded me also of an older post by Ezra Klein in which the commenters voiced all the usual arguments heard in this debate.
There are a couple of more details that I have not touched upon in the previous posts.
First, lack of sleep can lead to obesity and even diabetes, as the circadian clock is tightly connected to the ghrelin/leptin system of hormonal control of hunger, feeding and fat-deposition.
Second, lack of sleep discourages exercise. Put these two pieces of data together, and you get a national epidemic of obesity, not just a bunch of sleep-deprived children.
Third, lack of sleep has a well-documented effect on mood. No, teenagers are not naturally that moody – at least not all of them. They are just barely “functional” (instead of “optimal”) and walk through life like zombies because they are operating on 4-8 hours of sleep instead of 9 hours (optimal for teens, it goes down to about 8 for adults). Of course they are moody.
Fourth, chronic sleep deprivation can have long-term consequences, ranging from psychiatric diseases to cancer. Remember that teens in high-school (and college students are faring worse!) are constantly jet-lagged!
There is even a hypothesis floating around that sleep-delay in adolescence may affect the onset of picking up smoking.
Fifth – and I did not think of this although it is obvious – teenagers above a certain age, still in high school, are allowed to drive. If they are driving themselves to school at 6 or 7am, when their circadian clocks think is it 3 or 4am, it is as if they are driving drunk. There is actually a scale devised by one of the sleep researchers that tells which time of the night corresponds to what number of bottles of beer. Driving at 4am (or driving a ship, like Exxon Valdez, or operating a power-plant, like one in Chernobyl) is the equivalent of driving drunk – way over the legal limits. Teenagers driving at 7am are equally “drunk”.
One of the reasons for the resistance to healthy initiatives to change school-start schedules stems from the fact that the world is organized by adults and adults want to have the world run according to schedules that fit their moods and are unwilling to change it – they may not know that teens feel differently, or they defend their preferences nonetheless.
A large proportion of adults in this country still subscribe to barbaric notions that sleep is a shameful activity, a sign of laziness, and that teens need to be tortured in order to “steel” them to grow into “real men”. This has roots all the way back to the Puritan so-called “work-ethic” which is really a “no fun for anyone” punitive ethic long ago shown to be physically and emotionally debilitating.
When I was a kid, back in old now-non-existent Yugoslavia, most schools in big urban areas worked in two shifts. All the kids started school at 8am and ended at 1:15pm for one week, then started at 2pm and ended at 7:15pm the next week, and so on…
If a school had, let’s say, twelve classes of the seventh grade, six of those would be in the A-shift and the other six in the B-shift. Each shift had its own complete set of teachers, assistants, nurses…everything except the one shared Principal and the school psychologist.
The time between 1:15pm and 2pm was for supplementary classes (either for those who needed extra help, or for those preparing for Math Olympics and such) and clubs. That was also time for kids from two shifts to meet and get to know each other (it is amazing how many kids from opposite shifts started dating each other after the year-end Big Trip to the Coast). There was no such thing as the American hype for high-school competitive sports, which I still find strange and curious after 15 [now 20] years in this country.
Thus, you get to sleep in for a week (but miss out on afternoon activities), then have to get up relatively early for a week but have the afternoon free to gallivant around town. Nobody there understands what’s the American fuss over kids being home alone – of course they are home alone, cleaning the house, fixing meals, doing homework and BETTER be getting to school on time!
Teachers were pretty understanding about sleeping types. I do not recall ever having a big test, quiz or exam being given at the extremes of the day (around 8am or around 7pm). As an owl myself, I was much more likely to raise my hand, participate in discussions, or volunteer for oral examinations during the week when I was in school in the afternoon, and that was fine with most of my teachers.
Transportation was not an issue. Most kids lived close enough to their neighborhood school to walk. For those who lived a little farther away – hey, no problem, that’s Europe, so Belgrade has a huge and pretty efficient public transportation system. I do not remember ever seeing any of my friends ever being dropped off to school by a parent driving a car! Or being brought to or picked up from school by a parent beyond fourth grade at all – period. And the minimum driving age being 18, nobody drove themselves to school either.
In rural areas, there was no need for two shifts – something like 9am-2:15pm was good enough to accommodate all of the kids.
I do not think that this kind of system can be implemented in the USA. It relies on an efficient public transportation which, with exception of a few oldest East Coast cities, is practically non-existent. American cities have been built for cars.
But some things can be done.
First, swap the starting times so elementary kids go to school first, middle school next and high school last (e.g., around 8am, 8:30am and 9am respectively). Studies show that teens do not go to sleep later if their school starts later. Some cynics claim that is what teens will do. But they do not. Actually, they fall asleep at the same time, thus gaining an additional hour of sleep.
Teens are almost adults. The current generation of teens, perhaps because of a closer and tighter contact with their parents than any generation before, is the most serious, mature and responsible generation I have seen. Give them a benefit of the doubt. Just because you were into mischief and hated your parents when you were their age does not mean that today’s kids are the same.
Second, start the school day – for all kids every day – with PE (or some kind of exercise), preferably outdoors, as both exposure to daylight and the exercise have been shown to aid in phase-shifting the circadian clock.
Third, let them eat breakfast afterwards (sticking to a meal schedule also helps entrain the clock). Follow up with the electives which kids may be most interested in.
By the time they hit math, science and English classes around 11 or so, their bodies are finally fully awake and they can understand what the teacher is saying, and do the tests with a clear mind instead of in a sleepy haze.
Do not permit any caffeine to be sold in schools. Advise parents not to allow TV or any other electronics to be in kids’ bedrooms. Let them enjoy those activities in the living room. Bedroom is for sleeping, and sleeping alone. A book before bed is fine, but screens just keep them awake even longer.
Finally, rethink all those extra activities you are forcing the teens to do: sports, art, music, etc. In teen’s minds, the day does not start with the beginning of school in the morning. We may think that we are at work most of our day. Teens do not – they consider their day to begin at the time school-day is over. Their day begins in the afternoon. School is something they have to deal with before they can have their day. Realize this and give them time and space to do with their day what they want. Do not push them to do things that you think they’ll need to get into Harvard. Let them be – leave them alone. Then they’ll go to sleep at a normal time.
Concern for our kids’ physical and mental health HAS to trump all other concerns, including economic costs, cultural traditions and adult preferences. We have a problem and we need to do something, informed by science, to fix the problem. Blaming the messenger, proposing to do nothing, and, the worst, blaming the kids, is unacceptable.
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All of this targets high-schoolers. However, there is barely any mention of college students who are, chronobiologically, in the same age-group as high-school students, i.e., their sleep cycles are phase-delayed compared to both little kids and to adults.
In a way, this may be because there is not much adults can do about college students. They are supposedly adults themselves and capable of taking care of themselves. Nobody forces (at least in theory) them to take 8am classes. Nobody forces them to spend nights partying either.
They are on their own, away from their parents’ direct supervision, so nobody can tell them to remove TVs and electronic games out of their bedrooms. The college administrators cannot deal with this because it is an invasion of students’ privacy.
Forward-looking school systems in reality-based communities around the country have, over the last several years, implemented a policy that is based on science – sending elementary school kids to school first in the morning, middle-schoolers next, and high-schoolers last. This is based on the effects of puberty on the performance of the human circadian clock.
For teenagers, 6am is practically midnight – their bodies have barely begun to sleep. Although there have been some irrational (or on-the-surface-economics-based) voices of opposition – based on outdated notions of laziness – they were not reasonable enough, especially not in comparison to the scientific and medical information at hand, for school boards to reject these changes.
I am very happy that my kids are going to school in such an enlightened environment, and I am also happy to note that every year more school systems adopt the reasonable starting schedules based on current scientific knowledge.
Yet, college students are, from what I heard, in much worse shape than high-schoolers. Both groups should sleep around 9 hours per day (adults over thirty are good with about 8 hours). High-schoolers get on average 6.9 hours. College students are down to about five! The continuous insomnia of college students even has its own name in chronobiology: Student Lag (like jet-lag without travelling to cool places). Is there anything we, as a society, can do to alleviate student lag? Should we?
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This kind of ignorant bleating makes me froth at the mouth every time – I guess it is because this is my own blogging “turf”.
One of the recurring themes of my blog is the disdain I have for people who equate sleep with laziness out of their Puritan core of understanding of the world, their “work ethic” which is a smokescreen for power-play, their vicious disrespect for everyone who is not like them, and the nasty feeling of superiority they have towards the teenagers just because they are older, bigger, stronger and more powerful than the kids. Not to forget the idiotic notions that kids need to be “hardened”, or that, just because they managed to survive some hardships when they were teens, all the future generations have to be sentenced to the same types of hardships, just to make it even. This is bullying behavior, and disregarding and/or twisting science in the search for personal triumphalism irks me to no end.
I hated getting up early, too. I still hate it, and I’m so far beyond growth hormones that I don’t even remember how they felt. But I do remember that in middle and high school, I dragged myself out of the house at 5 a.m. every day of the week to deliver papers before I caught the 6:45 a.m. bus to school. I never fell asleep in class. Neither did anybody else. And something caused me to grow 6 inches and add 35 pounds between sophomore and junior year. At the end of that kind of day, complete with cross-country, basketball or track, I had no trouble falling asleep at 10 p.m.
He said that he grew up in height and weight when he was in high school. Who knows how much more he would have grown if he was not so sleep deprived (if his self-congatulatory stories are to be believed and he did not slack off every chance he had). Perhaps he would not grow up to be so grouchy and mean-spirited if he had a more normal adolescence.
I don’t know where he got the idea that growth hormone is a cause of the phase-delay of circadian rhythms in adolescence. It could be, but it is unlikely – we just don’t know yet. But, if a hormone is a cause, than it is much more likely to be sex steroids. Perhaps his sleep-deprived and testosterone-deprived youth turned him into a sissy with male anxiety he channels into lashing at those weaker than him?
In previous centuries, adolescents in an agrarian society got up at 4:30 or 5a.m. with their parents to milk the cows or do any other of a long list of chores. Did growth hormones pass them by? Where were the “studies” that showed they really needed to go to bed after midnight and sleep until 10? And why weren’t their parents all being reported to the DSS? Oh, that’s right, there was no DSS. How did that generation survive?
He assumes that in times before electricity, teenagers used to wake up and fall asleep at the same time adults did. Well, they did not. Studies of sleep patterns in primitive tribes show that adolescents are the last ones to wake up (and nobody bashes them for it – it is the New Primitives with access to the media that do that) and the last ones to fall asleep – they serve as first-shift sentries during the night watch.
Even in this, the 21st century, kids who enter the military at 17 find that they can fall asleep easily at 9:30 or 10, because they know they’re going to be getting up at 4:30 or 5. Apparently the Army hasn’t read the study on circadian rhythms.
Actually, the military being the most worried by this problem is funding a lot of research on circadian rhythms and sleep and has been for decades. Because they know, first hand, how big a problem it is and that yelling sargeants do not alert soldiers make.
Kids, if you need more sleep, my study shows there’s a simple way to get it. Turn off – I mean “power down” – the cell phone, the iPod and the computer sometime before 11 p.m. Turn off the TV. Turn off the light. Lie down in bed and close your eyes.
…and sit in the dark for the next four hours, heh?
What especially drives me crazy is that so many teachers, people who work with adolescents every day, succumb to this indulgence in personal power over the children. It is easier to get into a self-righteous ‘high’ than to study the science and do something about the problem. It is easier to blame the kids than to admit personal impotence and try to do something about it by studying the issue.
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My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme “owl” (hence the name of this blog), I am a parent of developing extreme “owls”, I have a particular distaste for Puritanical equation of sleep with laziness which always raises its ugly head in discussions of adolescent sleep, and much of my own past research was somewhat related to this topic.
So, I was particularly pleased when Jessica of the excellent Bee Policy blog informed me of the recent publication of a book devoted entirely to this topic. Snooze…or Lose! by Helen Emsellem was published by National Academies and Jessica managed to get me an advanced reading copy to review.
Her daughter Elyssa wrote one of the chapters in the book and is promoting the book and the information relevant to teenagers at the place where teenagers are most likely to see it – on MySpace (you see – it’s not just music bands who caught onto this trick – serious information can be promoted at MySpace as well).
The main audience for this book are teenagers themselves and their parents – I think in this order although officially the order is reversed. Secondarily, the audience are teachers, administrators and officials in charge of school policy. Who this book is not targeted to are scientists and book reviewers because there are no end notes!
Anyway, considering that the main audience are teens, their parents and teachers (i.e., laypeople), the book is admirably clear and readable. The book starts out with presenting the problem – the chronic sleep deprivation of adolescents in modern society – and provides ample evidence that this is indeed a wide-spread problem. It continues with a simple primer on physiology of sleep and circadian rhythms, followed by a review of the current knowledge of the negative consequences of chronic sleep deprivation: from susceptibility to diseases, through psychological and behavioral problems, to problems of physical and mental performance.
A whole chapter – the one I found most interesting – is devoted to the role of sleep in various kinds of memory and the negative effects of sleep deprivation on learning – both declarative and episodic memory, as well as kinesthetic memory needed for athletic performance and safe driving. This is where I missed the end notes the most.
Throughout the book, Dr.Emsellem makes statements of fact about sleep that are obviously derived from research. I’d like to see the references to that research so I can evaluate for myself how strong each such statement is. Although my specialty is chronobiology (physiology, development, reproduction, behavior, ecology and evolution) of birds, and secondarily that of mammals, reptiles, invertebrates and microorganisms (I could never quite get excited about clocks in fish, fungi and plants, or molecular aspects of circadian rhythms, or medical aspects of human rhythms), I am quite familiar with the literature on sleep, including in humans.
Thus, I know that the statements in the book reflect scientific consensus but that the meaning of “consensus” is quite elastic. In some cases, it means “there is a mountain of evidence for this statement and no evidence against it, so it is highly unlikely that this will change any time soon”. In other cases it means “there are a few studies suggesting this, but they are not perfect and there are some studies with differing results, and this can stand for now but is likely to me modified or completely overturned by future research”.
Having end notes would help the expert reader see how weak or strong each one of these findings is, and would also be suggestive to lay readers that the statements in the book are supported by actual research and are not just the author’s invention as seen in so many self-help books. End notes and references add to the believability of the text even if one does not bother to check the papers out.
The book then turns to variety of factors, both biological and social, that conspire to deprive our teens of sleep, both from the perspective of a sleep researcher and from the perspective of teenagers. Little snippets of teenagers’ thoughts on the topic are included throughout the book and add an important perspective as well as make the book more fun to read. Otherwise, the “case studies”, the bane of so many psychology books, are kept to the minimum, discussed very briefly, and used wisely..
In the next section, Dr.Emsellem turns to solutions. First, she present several tests of sleep deprivation that readers can administer themselves in order to self-diagnose the problem. She then describes ten different strategies that parents and teens can work on together in order to solve the problem of sleep deprivation and all the concomittant negative effects (and Alyssa adds her own chapter on the teen perspective on how those can work). If that does not work, she describes additional methods that a sleep doctor may prescribe to help solve the problem. There is also a short chapter describing a couple of other sleep disorders, e.g., sleep apnea, that also contribute to sleep deprivation in affected individuals.
The last portion of the book addresses the social aspects of sleep deprivation and changes that parents and teens can make in their homes, as well as broader community, towards solving the problem. For adults, being a role model for the child is important and this requires paying attention to one’s own sleep hygiene.
The very last portion is really the raison d’etre of the book – how to make one’s community change the school starting times. The author presents a couple of examples of school districts in which such change was enacted, the strategies parents used to force such changes and the incredible positive results of such changes. The whole book is really designed to provide information to parents and teens who are working on changing their local attitudes toward school starting times.
The schools used to start about 9am for most of the century (and before). Then, due to the pressure from business and economic (read “busing”) woes of school districts, the school starting times started creeping earlier and earlier starting back in 1970s until they reach the horribly early times seen today in many places, requiring kids to get up as early as 5am in order to catch the school bus on time. As a result, high schoolers (and to some extent middle schoolers and college students) sleep through the first two periods in school, feel weak and groggy all day long, more easily succumb to diseases, have trouble learning and performing well in school and the athletic field, and are in too bad mood to be pleasant at home – this is not the natural state of things as much as the stereotype of the “grouchy teen” is prevalent in the society, it is mainly due to sleep deprivation and the biggest factor causing sleep deprivation are early school starting times.
In places in which enlightened and progressive school boards succumbed to the wishes of parents and students, i.e., in places in which parents and students used smart diplomatic tactics to engender such change, the positive results are astounding. The grades went up. The test scores went up. The students are happy. The parents are happy. The teachers are happy. The coaches are happy because their teams are winning all the state championships. There is a decrease in tardiness and absences. There is a decrease in sick days and even in numbers of diagnoses of ADD and depression in teens. There is a drop in teen crime. There is a drop in car accidents involving teens (by 15% in one place!). The whole county feels upbeat about it!
While the book makes me – a scientist – thirsty for end notes and references, it does remarkably well what it was designed to do – arm the parent and kids with knowledge needed to make a positive change in their communities – a change that is necessary in order to raise new generations to be healthy and successful, something we owe to our children.
We should do this no matter how much it costs, but the experiences from places in which the changes were made, contrary to doomsayers, is that there was no additional cost to this at all. The changes were implemented slowly and with everyone involved pitching in their opinion and their expertise until the best possible system was arrived at, adapted to the local community situation. No new buses were needed to be rented. No unexpected new costs appeared. And having a safe, happy community saved money elsewhere (e.g., accidents and crime rate decline). And it worked wonderfully everywhere.
So, get the book and let your child read it, you read it, give a copy to other people in your community: the teachers, the school principal, the pediatrician, the child psychologist, the school board members, the superintendent of education and the governor. This is something that is easy to do, there are no good reasons against it and the health and the future of our kids is at stake. It is something worth fighting for and this book is your first weapon.
For the greatest portion of the history of biology, every organism was a “model organism”. One would pick a problem and then choose which organism would be most suited for answering those particular questions. Then, in the 1990s, everyone jumped onto the bandwagon of studying just a handful of organisms that could be genetically modified at the time: mouse, fruitfly, thale cress, zebrafish, African clawed frog, bread mold, brewer’s yeast, or E.coli. All the other organisms were all but abandoned, only studied by a small number of die-hard researchers and, increasingly, amateurs. Now that technology allows us to investigate (and to some extent manipulate) entire genomes of almost any species we’d like, researchers are going back and rediscovering the abandoned model organisms once again. One of these is Anolis, a large group of species of lizards, noted for their dewlaps, and known especially for their fast adaptive radiation on tropical islands.
And now there is a blog that covers everything about these lizards – Anole Annals. Posts are written both by veteran researchers and their students, from several laboratories, as well as other contributors. They cover both recent and historical papers on evolution, ecology, biogeography, behavior, physiology, biomechanics and genetics of this diverse group of reptiles. They also describe their own research, including anecdotes and adventures from field work, equipment they use in the lab, and successes in discovery. On top of that, they help people ID the species from pictures, pay attention to the appearance of anoles in art and in the popular culture and generally have a lot of fun doing all of this. A blog entirely devoted to just one group of animals sounds very ‘niche’, but what they did was build a blog that has something for everyone and is a great fun (as well as insightful and educational) read for everyone.
…Today we take for granted that all material objects in the universe are comprised of discrete “bits” of matter, which we call atoms; however, even up until the early 20th century there were still proponents of the continuum hypothesis, in which all matter is assumed to be infinitely divisible…
I’m sure many mothers can attest to the following: You have friends who also are mothers. I bet that for most of us, those friends represent a spectrum of attitudes about parenting, education, religion, Fifty Shades of Grey, recycling, diet, discipline, Oprah, and more. They also probably don’t all dress just like you, talk just like you, have the same level of education as you, same employment, same ambitions, same hair, or same toothpaste. And I bet that for many of us, in our interactions with our friends, we have found ourselves judging everything from why she insists on wearing those shoes to why she lets little Timmy eat Pop Tarts. Yet, despite all of this mental observation and, yes, judging, we still manage to get along, go out to dinner together, meet at one another’s homes, and gab our heads off during play dates. That’s not a war. That’s life….
The Earth’s earliest days were largely free of oxygen. Then, around 2.5 billion years ago, primitive bacteria started to flood the atmosphere with this vital gas. They produced it in the process of harnessing the sun’s energy to make their own nutrients, just as plants do today. The building oxygen levels reddened the planet, as black iron minerals oxidised into rusty hues. They also killed off most of the world’s microbes, which were unable to cope with this new destructive gas. And in the survivors of this planetary upheaval, life’s first clock began to tick and tock….
Earlier this week, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, told British journalists that he’d been warned of an ingenious Chinese plot to assassinate him with poison. Very ingenious, according to the plot he laid out for the Sunday Telegraph. He’d learned, he said, of a plan to send out a squad of women, pretending to be followers, who would have poison spread through either their hair or headscarves. When he laid his hands on their heads for a blessing, a lethal dose could be absorbed through his skin…
….But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat. When the egg hatches, the confused larva does not develop into an adult in the human’s intestines. Instead, it acts as it would inside a pig. It burrows into the person’s bloodstream and gets swept through the body. Often those parasites end up in the brain, where they form cysts….
Next time the government wants new ideas about how to protect our nation’s security, it should consult an octopus. That’s the unusual proposition of marine biologist Rafe Sagarin, a pioneer in the infant field of “natural security,” where experts use models from nature to help them come up with emergency responses to everything from terrorist attacks to pandemics. Sagarin has just published a book about his work called Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease. Any scientific theory that involves the superiority of cephalopods is automatically intriguing, so I called up Sagarin to talk about it.
Yesterday the DSN crew first saw the video above. What is this large floating sheet of goo? Is it alive? Was it once alive? The two leading contenders seems to be that it is A) an old whale placenta or B) a rare and enigmatic deep-sea jellyfish. And the answer is…. B)
….The problem is that most of the popular physics that the public enjoys constitutes perhaps 10% of the research that physicists worldwide are engaged in. Again, count the number of physics books in your local bookstore, and you will notice that about 90% of them cover quantum mechanics, cosmology, particle physics and “theories of everything”. You would be hard-pressed to find volumes on condensed matter physics, biophysics, the physics of “soft” matter like liquids and non-linear dynamics. And yes, these are bonafide fields of physics that have engaged physics’s best minds for decades and which are as exciting as any other field of science. Yet if you ask physics-friendly laymen what cutting-edge physics is about, the answers will typically span the Big Bang, Higgs boson, black holes, dark matter, string theory and even time-travel. There will be scant mention if any of say spectroscopy, optics, polymers, magnetic resonance, lasers or even superconductivity….
I wish I could take dinosaurs away from the media for a while. Someone certainly should. Lazy journalists and unscrupulous documentary creators have amply demonstrated that they just can’t play nice with Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and kin…
What leads people to acts of violence and genocide? What triggers empathy and altruism? Duke evolutionary biologist Brian Hare and research scientist Vanessa Woods believe the answer may be found in the great ape known as the bonobo….
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Special topic: snakes:
And the Cascabel will Fall Quiet… by John F Taylor. Rattlesnakes may actually be learning and they may become more dangerous if their roundups aren’t stopped.
Digital Pagination by Nate Barham. The page-flip is just another in a long line of “unnecessary” features to help us poor humans understand the content.
If you just received your new issue of Scientific American, you saw the article The Problems with ITER and the Fading Dream of Fusion Energy by Geoff Brumfiel. Accompanying image (a little small online, but nice and big in print) is a photograph by Hironobu Maeda of a sculpture by Sachiko Akinaga. It is a LEGO model of the ITER fusion reactor which has been under construction for many years now, and apparently will keep being under construction for many years to come.
You may think that the image is a photoshop, or a drawing, or that perhaps the LEGO model does exist somewhere, perhaps in some studio in Japan, or at ITER construction site itself.
But no. The model is in the middle of the Scientific American newsroom! A couple of weeks ago when I went to our New York City office, I took these photos of the model. Now that the embargo has lifted, I can show you some more details of the model:
In the flood of information, filters are invaluable – people you trust to pick the best so you can focus on that, only that, and ignore the less important stuff.
Ed Yong’s weekly linkfests (like this one) and monthly Top 10 choices he’d pay for (see this for an example) are must-bookmark resources.
Some other bloggers are occasional or regular sources of links I pay attention to, e.g., John Dupuis on academia, publishing, libraries and books, Chad Orzel on academia and science – especially physics, Mike the Mad Biologist on science and politics, and the crew at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker for the media coverage of science. And at the NASW site, Tabitha Powledge has a must-read On science blogs this week summary every Friday.
Most of the articles and blog posts I read every day are brought to my attention by my friends on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook, I get some through email notifications, as well as gleaned from ScienceBlogging.org and ScienceSeeker.org science blog aggregators. I then share a LOT of those links to my followers on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus every day.
Every workday around midnight I post a linkfest on The Network Central to make it easier to see our network posts if you missed them during the day. Khalil and I take turns highlighting the best work by up-and-coming science writers on The SA Incubator blog. Weekly posting of the ever-growing list of posts submitted for the Open Laboratory is another resource. SciAm homepage is also set as a collection of filters – we decide what goes into “Blogs” box, what in the “Latest News” feed, what in the “Science Agenda” on top of the page, and what to collect into “In-Depth Reports” over time.
Now I will also start a weekly collection of links that are “best of the best” of everything I read over a period of a week – not the posts from #SciAmBlogs, but the rest of the Web: other blogs and other media sites. That means a lot of cutting! I mean, I tweet TONS of links every day! Choosing the best will not come easy to me, so this is a good exercise for me as well, and I hope will become a useful resource to you.
I’ll try to do this every Friday, time of day dependent on travel, work, life etc. Let me know in the comments if you have suggestions for formatting, timing, etc.
The Moscow Rules were directives that undercover American intelligence agents allegedly used in the Cold War. The rules were there to increase agent’s chances of making it out safely.
Sometimes, being in academic science can feel like being enemy territory in a cold war. You are often in strange territory (new lab), with many unfamiliar people (other grad students, post-docs, faculty) whose motivations are unclear. You might not trust them completely (especially administrators). There might not be the risk of attempted assassination by having poison injected into you with a specially built umbrella, but there’s enough similarity that the Moscow Rules can still apply…
…“As you well know, some days things just don’t seem to go well when testing whole animal performance. On one of those days out of frustration, fatigue, etc., we simply yelled at an apparent “slacker” lizard in jest. Much to our surprise this seemed to make a difference. We were also aware of the two recent papers for other species of lizards in which sound appeared relevant to behaviors associated with detecting threats. So, we figured what the heck, why not test for such effects systematically. Unlike many of the studies that you and others have performed with anoles, unless we simply can’t get a lizards to run along the racetrack or they appear unhealthy, we include data from all of the individuals rather than subjectively rating the trials for their quantity. Perhaps, some of the gains in speed associated with our yelling were greatest for those individuals that otherwise might have been discarded after receiving a poor subjective quality rating. Of course, we lack a simple way of determining this. Similarly, we have not yet methodically tested for whether expletives are more effective that milder language.”…
Both publications posit that life, at its most abstract, involves a thermodynamic disequilibrium. That is, life involves physical structures that can only maintain their integrity with inputs of energy. These physical structures will require covalent bonds between atoms (to allow nontrivial chemical reactions), so the environment in which life appears must allow such chemistry to occur. Some kind of liquid, but not necessarily water, would therefore also be necessary to enable those reactions. Finally, some molecules in the living system would need to be capable of Darwinian evolution for the life to arise. (Take note, creationist doubters of evolution: it is now a useful part of the definition of life!)
From theory and experiments, both papers argue that life with these traits could evolve under a wide (but definitely limited) range of environments. Carbon-based life on worlds with liquid water might represent a particularly versatile and common set of solutions, but biochemistry could go in many directions even on Earthlike worlds. And on planets and moons where terrestrial life would perish instantly, life based on silicon instead of carbon or liquid hydrocarbons instead of water might thrive…
I always feel awkward when I talk to plastic patients. The simulation mannequins are impressive: their eyes blink, their chests expand as they breathe, they have pulses, they bleed, they burn. A screen monitors vital signs: I administer a pressor and a dipping blood pressure perks up, or I order a beta blocker and a racing heart rate slows. A physician in the next room lends her voice to play the patient, responding to what I do and say. A physician in the same room becomes a tech, relying results of my tests and nudging me through the next steps when I veer off course….
In an important sense, nothing exists until it’s given a name. And in the living world of organisms, names—official, scientific names—are assigned by unique creatures called taxonomists, experts in the minutiae of structure and biology of particular groups of organisms, working according to a strict and arcane body of rules of biological nomenclature. These individuals tend to be specialists—sages of whales, anglerfishes, microscopic worms that live only between the grains of sand on beaches, microscopic algae, purple sulfur bacteria, and everything in between…
Social networks put a number on those weak ties, but we all have weak ties in our meatspace lives. Marche bemoans how we use machines to check out at the grocery store instead of waiting in line with other people to have our purchases rung up by an actual human. But I wonder — even if you were to speak to the woman giving you dirty looks because you were buying a product with a big carbon footprint, can you actually call that a meaningful relationship?
I talk to people all the time — cab drivers, waiters, flight attendants, the guy at the post office, my manicurist, my barista, the boys at the convenience store where I buy my cigarettes, the guy at the newsstand. I am there, in the flesh. Does this mean our connections are any more meaningful than a like or a plus on social media?
Weak ties exist. They’re everywhere. All we have to do to make them meaningful is take the chance to go deeper. This is as true online as it is offline.
…executives and policy-makers love PAFs, and they especially love comparing them across different risk factors. They are nice, solid numbers that make for strong bullet points and eye-grabbing Powerpoint slides. They have a nasty habit of becoming influential well beyond their actual scientific value. I have seen them used as the arbitrators of decisions, lined up on a single graphic that supposedly illustrates the magnitude of different problems. But of course, they do no such thing…
Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions. A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace…
Manufacturers of fire retardants rely on questionable testimony, front groups to push standards that boost demand for their toxic — and ineffective — products
Animals have a long tradition of being bilaterally symmetrical – that is, of the left side and the right being nearly identical. Sure, there are a few exceptions – the human heart is nearly always farther to the left side, for instance. Snakes and other elongate, limbless animals sometimes stagger their paired organs (gonads, kidneys) so that one is in front of the other, to better fit in their cylindrical bodies. Most snakes have even done away with one of their two lungs. But the basic external body plan, the bones and muscles on the left and the right, are always mirror-images of one another, right?
Sometimes, just hearing that certain chemicals are in food just puts people off. “I think that a lot of people would be really surprised about the precise chemicals that are used to make their favorite foods,” said Dr. Hartings. Take Cool Whip for example. One of its ingredients is polysorbate-60, a chemical that helps give Cool Whip its puffy appearance. Polysorbate-60 moonlights as an ingredient in sexual lubricants like K-Y YOURS+MINE. Our foods contain all kinds of chemicals that have more than one job. Thankfully, one of those jobs is making food delicious.
Imagine a world of two dimensions, a world with no up or down… just across. No climbing, falling, jumping, or ducking… just shimmying and sidling. Welcome to the world of the sea skater.
Sea skaters, or ocean striders, are small bugs. They’re relatives of the pond skaters or water striders that zip spread-eagled across the surface of ponds and lakes. Except they skate over the open ocean, eating plankton at the surface…
Having a scan of your brain is a uniquely odd experience. I had one done once. I was loaded, torpedo-like, into a claustrophobia-inducing, cocoon-like chamber for nearly an hour, the first few terrifying minutes of which I spent desperately trying to recall whether I had actually passed that metal ball-bearing I swallowed when I was a kid. The machines themselves are pretty damn loud, but something about repetitive clunking noises seems to lull me into a state of relaxation, so I spent the majority of my time in the launch chamber trying not to snooze. Honestly, it was all quite enjoyable…
There exists on my hard drive a folder into which I loathe copying files, but only slightly less than I would loathe deleting them all together. It is a folder called “Aborted Manuscripts” and it is this folder which is the source of my shame. It is a graveyard of stupid ideas and of great ones poorly executed, of unfinished cogitations, of journal rejections, of unresponsive colleagues and of frustrating students. It’s a roadmap documenting 15 years of science (read: “me”) not doing what science (read: “me”) is supposed to do – get published…
The bell curve powerfully shapes how we think of human performance: If lots of students or employees happen to show up as extreme outliers — they’re either very good or very bad — we assume they must represent a skewed sample, because only a few people in a truly random sample are supposed to be outliers.
New research suggests, however, that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers.
Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution…
From the diver who finds the body parts, to the forensic specialist who identifies flecks of paint on the victim and the handwriting expert who examines the killer’s notes… What happens behind the yellow tape of one crime scene
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column contains sophomoric humor and references to the bodily functions of dinosaurs and the size of certain anatomical features of mice, all in the name of science. If this kind of thing offends you, please skip this and go right to Marmaduke. That dog, he cracks us up…
Most visitors to the million-year-old Dachstein Giant Ice Cave prefer to wear standard winter coats during visits to its freezing, icy interior. But for five days the Dachstein cave systems were a temporary lab for a squad of space scientists. Some 50 scientists assembled from three continents to use the UNESCO World Heritage site as a proxy for Mars—a first for the cave system, which normally hosts jazz concerts, modern art exhibits, laser shows, and a steady stream of tourists….
But of course, this is because academics have two different kinds of self-promotion. One is ok, and one is not. One takes place in the ivory tower, and one involves the dreaded public…
Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots, those huge regions of the star darkened by shifts in its magnetic field. He projected the Sun’s image from his viewing device onto a plate of glass stained a “pale straw colour,” which gave him a picture of the fiery globe one inch shy of a foot in diameter…
…Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer decided to investigate coffee spilling at a fluid dynamics conference last year when they watched overburdened participants trying to carry their drinks to and fro. They quickly realized that the physics wasn’t simple. Aside from the mechanics of human walking, which depends on a person’s age, health, and gender, there is the highly involved science of liquid sloshing, which depends on a complex interplay of accelerations, torques, and forces. …
…Yes, some speakers are better than others, and a few of the 42 talks I heard were very good. Also, I know I used to commit many of the same sins I witnessed in talks yesterday and the day before, so as I list the problems, I’ll flag my own bad habits (current and former). Based on conversations with my friends, this is not a problem limited to particle physics conferences, much less to physics conferences in general: it’s endemic in science, and perhaps most academic fields…
Spacesuits are poised to go the way of the cell phone – once bulky and cumbersome, researchers are working on making them slim and smart. In the future, astronauts might be wearing specially engineered garments that combine the life-preserving features of a spacesuit with augmented reality technology that could intuit the wearer’s needs…
…Neuroscience is sort of where genetics was 20-30 years ago: The scientific frontier, fascinating to the public, changing the general worldview, raising ethical questions, science fiction’s closest reflection in reality. This has its benefits and its downfalls. There is currently strong general enthusiasm for neuroscience for just these reasons, but because everything ‘neuro’ is so exciting, the risk of media misrepresentation is high and the misuse of neuroscience concepts and terms by pseudo-science is common. …
…Dr. Johnson says cells from fetal boys and girls have been found in mothers “four to five decades following the last pregnancy.” That fetus may have grown into a middle aged pharmacist, and still his cells are inside his mother. Cells wouldn’t persist in foreign body for NO reason. They must be doing something, but what?…
…what brings many students into anthropology, and still impassions me about the field, is that it does approach the question of “What does it mean to be human?” in the broadest, most interdisciplinary way. And it strikes me that we have some core analytical approaches to that question that matter, and that this style of thinking is what really makes up the holism of anthropology, rather than a particular commitment to four-fields and working across the different sub-disciplines. This human lens includes a comparative approach, an attention to variation across time and space, a recognition that we as researchers inevitably bias our own data, and, yes, a commitment to drawing on multiple strands of research…
There are 94 naturally occurring elements, from Hydrogen to Plutonium, and together they make up everything in the world. The stories of the elements are the stories of our own lives, revealing the details of our personal lives, the patterns of our economies, and our relationships with our natural resources.
94 Elements is a new global filmmaking project, exploring our lives through the lens of the elements. The project is producing a collection of stories by different filmmakers about the endless ways the elements touch our daily lives. Each filmmaker takes one element as the basis for a film around how it’s used. The films are surprising and moving human stories – this is not about science, but about our human relationships with our mineral resources.
Each prescription drug you take has a unique code that the government can use to track problems. But artificial hips and pacemakers? They are implanted without identification, along with many other medical devices. In fact, the FDA doesn’t know how many devices are implanted into patients each year – it simply doesn’t track that data.
The past decade has seen numerous high profile cases of malfunctioning medical devices, which have led to injury or even death. Critics say the FDA’s minimal monitoring of devices contributes to these problems….
As long as leptin levels stay within normal levels, all of the functions displayed above function normally. As the leptin levels drop, many of these functions are adversely effected. It is a wide-spread trigger for a starvation response. Why cripple the immune response during starvation? My best guess would be because of the huge energy expenditure required to keep the immune response running normally, especially in cellular proliferation.
New US findings suggest our accepted definition of a healthy vagina could be ethnically biased, say some researchers, but others caution against over-interpreting the data.
A new study published today in Science Translational Medicine found, what an accompanying commentary describes as, an “unexpected and astonishing” variability over time in the vaginal bacterial communities of apparently healthy women….
…A record number of people are depending on federally financed food assistance. Food-stamp use increased from an average monthly caseload of 17 million in 2000 to 44 million people in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site. Last year, one in six people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population—received food stamps.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau is part of an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007….
…Because his secondary crusade of the last few years, you know, the one against evil industrial chemicals, is really starting to annoy me. This is not saying that he’s entirely wrong – there are evil industrial chemicals out there. And, in many cases, they aren’t as well researched or as well regulated as they should be.
But if we, as journalists, are going to demand meticulous standards for the study and oversight of chemical compounds then we should try to be meticulous ourselves in making the case. And much as I would like it to be otherwise, I don’t see enough of that in Kristof’s chemical columns. They tend instead to be sloppy in their use of language, less than thorough, and chemophobic enough to undermine his legitimate points….
Scholars and pundits alike argue that U.S. scientists could do more to reach out to the general public. Yet, to date, there have been few systematic studies that examine how scientists understand the barriers that impede such outreach. Through analysis of 97 semi-structured interviews with academic biologists and physicists at top research universities in the United States, we classify the type and target audiences of scientists’ outreach activities. Finally, we explore the narratives academic scientists have about outreach and its reception in the academy, in particular what they perceive as impediments to these activities. We find that scientists’ outreach activities are stratified by gender and that university and disciplinary rewards as well as scientists’ perceptions of their own skills have an impact on science outreach. Research contributions and recommendations for university policy follow.
…So, to recap, 1) Cool paper. 2) Sex between blue-eyed people is not incest. 3) We have no idea when or where this mutation came from, but it is now conceivable that we could ask the question. 4) Embarrassingly bad science reporting spontaneously rises from the grave four years later and tries to eat your brain.
There is no substitute for direct replication – if you cannot reproduce the same result using the same methods then you cannot have a cumulative science. But conceptual replication also has a very important role to play in psychological science. What is conceptual replication? It’s when instead of replicating the exact same experiment in exactly the same way, we test the experiment’s underlying hypothesis using different methods…
Another reason conceptual replication is so important is that if the field relies exclusively on direct replication then they risk replicating the same mistakes as well. Today I wanted to illustrate this risk by looking back at the history of one of social psychology’s most influential theories: cognitive dissonance. The richness and depth of Cognitive Dissonance Theory is a result of dozens of conceptual replications. I suggest that, had it not been for conceptual replication – had dissonance only been tested and re-tested in the original paradigm (Brehm’s Free Choice Paradigm) – the theory may not have stood up to recent criticisms directed at that particular paradigm…
A chimpanzee at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden has been lauded for his ‘innovation’ and ‘sophisticated cognitive skills,’ after behaving like a complete schmuck.
As many as 900 dolphins and over 4,000 pelicans have washed up dead on the beaches of northern Peru in the last couple of months, (see news coverage here, here and here), leading to a flurry of activity as various authorities and other interested parties move to find out what is going on. Experts cited in the news coverage suggest that unusually warm surface waters (10F higher than the season average) are changing the swimming patterns of the huge anchovetta schools off the coast of Peru, driving them deeper and out of the diving range of pelicans. In other words, the pelicans appear to be starving. The dolphins on the other hand, have shown a high prevalence of infection with morbilivirus, which is an infectious disease…
A sperm cell, much like an expensive robotic vacuum cleaner, is a minimally intelligent body on a mission. Both the Roomba and the male gamete have to navigate a walled space without much idea where they’re going or why. And although it won’t clean your floors on the way, the sperm cell uses some of the same strategy as the robot vacuum…
Naturally a mother bat is happy to welcome into the world a bouncing baby whatever, as long as it has all its fingers and toe-claws. But she also wants her little one to have every advantage she can give it. So when spring comes early, big brown bats prefer to keep their female embryos. Unwanted males are reabsorbed into their mothers’ bodies as if they never existed…
…By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers. (If a book isn’t read until it’s written in — as I was always told — then maybe an article is not published until it’s been commented upon.) Writers know this already. The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit — suitable for framing, not much else.
We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published — serving as some of the very first dictionaries in Europe.
Any article, journalistic or scientific, that sparks a debate typically winds up looking more like a good manuscript 700 years ago than a magazine piece only 10 years ago. The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline. …
..We might be hard put to find any area of science coverage that hasn’t been subject to those kinds of distortions. Coverage of Lipitor and its ilk was certainly as likely to contain dramatic headlines, and particular agendas, including those of pharmaceutical companies. And ideological arguments? It depends upon what the meaning of “ideological” is…
From advice about “exercising your mind” to treatises on “the gay brain,” media coverage of neuroscience in the UK often pushes “thinly disguised ideological arguments” and reinforces artificial divisions between social groups, according to a new study….
…In the past several years, we’ve all heard readers mourn the passing of the printed word. The elegy is familiar: I crave the smell of a well-worn book, the weight of it in my hands; all of my favorite books I discovered through loans from a friend, that minor but still-significant ritual of trust; I need to see it on my shelf after I’ve read it (and I don’t mind if others see it too); and what is a classic if not a book where I’m forced to rediscover my own embarrassing college-age marginalia?
Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book’s other qualities—from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty—will take on more importance. The future is yet to be written, but a few possibilities for the fate of the paper book are already on display on bookshelves near you…
…He expected — and banked on — the web’s virality, he says; he didn’t anticipate, though, how eagerly that web’s self-defined news sources would pass along his “discovery.” And he assumed people would figure out the story’s hoaxiness much more quickly than they actually did — and, then, that the corrective powers of the social web would make that joke clear within the first hour or so after the story went live…
…Berners-Lee said he was concerned about how increased demands for monitoring the web, both from governments looking for greater powers to track down terrorists and companies looking to trade our personal web data for commercial purposes, threatens the very infrastructure of the web.
He described his worry that people in the end will no longer trust and use the web for e.g. researching sensitive things like depression if they fear everything they do online is being monitored…
One of today’s most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems plaguing our education system: including reconciling student debt, providing students with the skills required to land a job both before and after graduation, and offering the best course material online regardless of age, location and educational level…
One topic we neglected, however, was what current medical students can do right now to get their foot in the door and begin engaging in the social media and medicine conversation. I had hoped to get to this topic during my panel discussion, but there just weren’t enough hours to cover everything. Below is my attempt to remedy this omission. Here are a few simple things you can do:
Imagine a situation where homes had no kitchens and utensils were unavailable. We would all be dependent on cafes and restaurants to eat and, it follows, our idea of what it is to prepare food would be exhausted by those working in such a capacity within these establishments. Now introduce kitchens into homes and affordable utensils into shops. Suddenly we can cook meals at home. Obviously the quality of the infrastructure is lower and there’s less expertise. For the sake of the thought-experiment, assume kitchens and utensils appeared suddenly, to an extent profoundly disruptive of established practices of going out for every meal. The meals cooked at home would be of poor quality, probably pragmatically orientated and often imitating (poorly) the meals available in restaurants and cafes.
Mr. McDonald said The Times currently has 1,500 advance obits in the can – “and we’re adding about 250 a year. Even if you subtract the number of those we’ll publish in a given year – say, 50 – the archive is growing significantly.”…
….The nice way to say this is that selects for pundits who have a thick skin—or forces them to quickly develop one. The less nice way to say it is that it forces you to stop giving a shit what other people think. Maybe not universally——you’ll pick out a domain of people whose criticisms are allowed to slip through the armor—but by default….
…The most popular sentence of the whole session was “Don’t underestimate your audience’s intelligence, but do underestimate their vocabulary.” In other words, drop the jargon if you want the public to get what you’re saying. …
…In the face of such a flood of information, no-one can read everything that’s made it through the filters into all their favourite journals. So in practice what actually happens is that each of us filters again – finding relevant publications in a huge range of journals by the social web we’re in: mailing lists, blogs, Twitter, and so on. I believe some people even use FaceBook….
…Twitter is what you make of it, and its flexibility is one of its greatest strengths. I’m going to explain why I have found it useful, professionally and personally, and lay out some guidelines for academics who don’t know where to start….
…But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, “walled gardens,” and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media. …
Appelbaum is absolutely right that Weisenthal stands apart by starting earlier, writing more, publishing faster. That’s who Joe is. But he’s absolutely wrong that there’s an “intensely competitive world of financial blogging, dominated by young men who work long hours and comment on every new development”. Go on — name a single other financial blogger who fits that description. I’m waiting. There’s the anonymous group blog ZeroHedge, perhaps. But the fact is that Henry Blodget, in hiring and promoting Joe, has succeeded in identifying and harnessing and leveraging a nervous energy which has been there all along. He didn’t start with some kind of inhuman job description and then hire Joe to fill it; he found Joe and then basked in the fruits of encouraging him to simply be his natural self.
…I don’t think that fancy layout trumps newness. The name “news” tells you what’s important about news. Newness. So if you follow that clue, it leads you to the obvious conclusion that news should present first the newest bits we have. What’s next? The second newest bits. And third, fourth and so on. permalink
News is one of those things that is that simple. But it takes people a while to get there if they don’t allocate the time to take walks in the park and think about this stuff in an organized way….
…But once the users can communicate with each other, we will be able to pool our experience, and given enough time, smart users will learn the technology well enough to make the products that (key point here) they know there is demand for. Because they are the ones demanding it….
…If you’re trying to juice page views, your staff will ineluctably be forced to make galleries. Where else can they get a 10x or 20x multiplier on their work? I can guarantee you that will not help you break the kinds of stories or do the kinds of analysis that will keep people coming back. Not only that, but it’s demoralizing to your best people, the ones who want to be out there producing their best work.
Worse, readers may click through your slideshow, but they’ll hate you a liiitttle bit more than they did when they got to the site. And I bet they’ll feel the same way about whatever advertiser was unlucky enough to get stuck on the page with some stupid thing that a reporter did with a little bit of hate in his heart and fingertips. ….
Posted onMay 3, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on ScienceOnline2012 – interview with Joe Kraus
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your background? Any scientific education?
I was born and raised in Southern Wisconsin in the late 1960s and 1970s. I went to Beloit College from 1985-1989 (with a short stint of engineering education in 1988) where I got my BS in Physics. Once I graduated college, my interests turned to astronomy for a time when I worked for a high end amateur telescope manufacturing company. My wife got her Masters in Statistics, and we ended up moving to Maryland just outside of Washington DC in 1991. There was a small recession going on, and I had a hard time finding a professional job with only a BS.
I always liked computers and libraries, and in the early 1990s I learned more about this new/old thing called the Internet. In 1993, I started the second phase of my life by attending graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park in Library & Information Science. After I got my MLS in 1995, we moved to northern Virginia for a little while where I was the engineering librarian at George Mason University. By 1997, we were still feeling a little claustrophobic in the Washington DC metro area. We were able to move out to Denver, Colorado in early 1998, and I have been at the University of Denver as the Science & Engineering Librarian since then.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I have been involved in the Special Libraries Association (SLA) since 1995. I was the Chair of the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division in 2007, and I was the Chair of the Sci-Tech Division in 2011. As chair of those two divisions, I provided program planning for twodifferent annual SLA Conferences. With the rise of the social web, I have gotten more involved with other organizations, such as the Library Society of the World (LSW. With the help of several other LSW participants, we organized a library Unconference in 2008. In 2009, I joined the editorial staff and helped launch the Open Access journal Collaborative Librarianship. I also post items to the Collaborative Librarianship News blog. In 2010, I helped organize another unconference, but this one was targeted to science and engineering librarians. We are organizing the 2nd STELLA Unconference later this year in New York City.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As the Science & Engineering Librarian at DU, I help a lot of students and faculty learn about and use scientific databases and journals. I have also been writing and reading about scholarly communications issues. I have a passion for blogging and telling people about the wonderful world of science.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The Internet is such an awesome way for people to share information and connect with one another. I am particularly interested in advocating for Open Access (and other cost-effective methods) to journal articles and Open Data proposals.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication?
This is the best conference concerning the scientific communication industry. It has a great mix of people from science journalism, science publishers, science book authors, scientists, science bloggers, and science librarians. Concerning next year, I would like to see the topic of Open Access and Open Data addressed. We should have an update session concerning the “Declaration of Independence” from Elsevier.
I have two take-aways from the 2012 conference. 1) I enjoyed using the electrical outlets that were available in the middle of the seating sections. The person who duck taped all of the extension cords and 6 outlet power strips deserves a raise. This allowed people to live tweet and live blog the conference without fear of draining a battery. 2) I found the discussion of the conflict between science journalists (who paraphrase scientists for a lay audience) and the scientists (who write for narrow specialized audiences) to be productive. Both sides now have a better understanding of the views of the other.
Overall, I find this conference to be essential in my quest to better understand the scientific communication process. I am looking forward to coming back to North Carolina again in 2013. Many thanks go to Bora (and Anton and Karyn and many others) for putting together such a great conference.
Posted onApril 2, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on How to break into science writing using your blog and social media (#sci4hels)
Yesterday I skyped into Czerne Reid’s science journalism class at University of Florida to talk about breaking into science writing as a profession, and especially the use of blogs and social media as tools for accomplishing that goal.
What does a new science journalist do to get noticed? How do you get people to read your work, give you assignments, follow you on Twitter, and generally just know who you are?
Rose Eveleth collected and organized the responses we received on Twitter (using hashtag #sci4hels), but here I’d like to provide, all in one place, a bunch of links to resources, other people’s thoughts about it, and a few brief thoughts of my own.
Ways of becoming a science writer
There are two basic trajectories: one more traditional, which I like to call “vertical”, and the other one I call “horizontal” which, though it happened with individual writers for a long time, seems to be a much more frequent, if not dominant trajectory these days.
The vertical trajectory is the one taken by people who, perhaps from a very early age, knew they wanted to become writers or journalists, perhaps specifically science journalists. They major in journalism in college (perhaps double-major in a science as well), work on their school paper, start internships early in their local papers (or radio or TV stations), then go to a Master’s program in science journalism. By the time they graduate from that, they already have lots of experience, several internships, many clips, perhaps some local awards, and are ready to start making a living as staff writers or freelancers.
The horizontal trajectory describes people who start out in science, with every intention of making a career in research. But, as tenure track is now an alternative career in science, most science students need to find other options. Some of them – those who always liked to write, wrote diaries as kids, etc. – will explore the option of becoming science writers. The most direct horizontal trajectory involves starting a science blog while still doing research, becoming known for good writing there, then start pitching stories for online (and later print) magazines, and gradually leaving the lab bench and starting to make a living by writing alone. Brian Switek, John Timmer and Ed Yong are probably the best known examples of people who took this path. Heck, I am one of those examples, too. Many more are somewhere along that trajectory right now.
Of course, those are extremes, too neatly cut apart. Many people will do something in the middle, combining the two approaches in some way. For example, they may pursue a career in research while also taking summer internships at science magazines, or editing the science section of the college newspaper. Some may major in science, then go to j-school for Masters. Also, not all of the new entries into science writing are young. Sure, some make the switch after college or Masters in science, but others make the switch later, after getting a PhD, or finishing a postdoc, or after years of teaching as adjunct faculty with no hope of ever getting a tenure track position, or even after many years as full faculty, once grant money dries out and there are no more resources to keep running the lab.
Either way, there comes a time when one becomes a professional science writer/journalist and has to make a living that way. What does one need to do to succeed?
Understanding the new media ecosystem
It is important to be aware that 20th century media ecosystem is a very unusual aberration in the way people communicated throughout history. Means of production were expensive. Very few people could afford to own printing presses, radio and TV studios, etc. Running all that complicated equipment required technical expertise and professional training. Thus media became locked up in silos, hierarchical, broadcast-only with little-to-none (and then again centrally controlled) means for feedback. There was a wealthy, vocal minority that determined what was news, and how to frame it, and the vast majority was consuming the news in silence.
Today, all one needs is some source of electricity (e.g., a small battery in your smartphone) and some means of accessing the Internet. The act of publishing is reduced to clicking on the “Publish” button. Yes, this still leaves some people out of the media, especially in the developing countries, but compared to just twenty years ago, vastly larger numbers of people now have access to the means of production of news. The obstacles to access – money, technical skills for running the machinery – are now much, much lower, almost free.
This turns everything on its head! Silos are breaking down, economics of media are severely disrupted, former gatekeepers are squealing in distress, old hierarchies are broken down (and replaced by new hierarchies), and now everyone has to learn new “media hygiene” practices: who to trust, how to filter the information, how to organize it for one’s self. The new ecosystem now contains both the traditional outlets and the individuals, “people formerly known as the audience“, as equal players.
There is only so much time and energy anyone can invest into consumption of the media. In the flood of information coming out every second, how does one get science to the audience? Specialized science media outlets cannot see each other as competition any more – they are now collaborators, helping each other toward the same goal: trying to, at least occasionally, displace trivia, Hollywood gossip, and dangerous pseudoscience with good science news. Individual science writers, as equal participants in the media ecosystem, should do the same: replace the notion of competition with the idea of cooperation.
How does a new science writer succeed in this new ecosystem? In the 20th century, one would try to ingratiate oneself with the gatekeepers, the editors. As they are still part of the ecosystem and probably will be for some time in the future, this strategy is still valuable, but it is only one of many. More important, if anything, is to build support networks with your colleagues, peers and buddies. The concepts of ‘Friends in Low Places’ and ‘Horizontal Loyalty’ are not just theoretical – put them to practice.
You may think of two potential career routes: getting hired as a staff writer somewhere (getting harder with each passing year), or to freelance. But there is a third way now: start and build your own media empire.
Huffington Post, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, BoingBoing started out as unknown person’s personal blogs – after turning into group blogs, then adding functionalities that let readers contribute, today they are media organizations that make money, hire and pay editors, and more. Perhaps your own blog can turn into something like this. But teaming up with your own Friends In Low Places may make such a start-up more successful.
First you have to write
People who want to become professional writers are, I assume, people who always liked to write. Childhood diaries. LiveJournals filled with teenage angst. Long Facebook updates. It’s time to take this seriously and do your writing in a more serious, organized, professional manner. Start a blog. This is your writing laboratory. Start blogging about science. Nobody will know about your blog until you start promoting it, so don’t worry that your early posts are clumsy (you can even delete the first few embarrassing posts later, once you are happy with your blog and start promoting it).
Try to figure out your beat (or obsession) – what is it that excites you the most? Write about that. Try to find your own niche. Become a “go to” person on a particular topic, become an expert (or at least a temporary expert) on that topic.
Ignore the “professional” advice about having to blog daily. It was a necessity a decade ago, not any more. In the days of RSS feeds and social media, it does not matter for your readers any more – they will find your posts no matter how infrequently you post. It only matters for you and your own writing habit that you blog with some regularity.
Also ignore the “professional” advice about writing relatively short blog posts. Leave that for brief news articles. Blog posts are longform, at least most of the time. And longform works online much better than short articles – the traffic keeps on giving for years, as people rediscover long posts, see them as resources, and share with their friends.
Also important to remember: You’re A Human, So Write Like One. How do I write? First I read and study the topic. Then, I compose text in my head (usually during dog walks, often over a number of days, sometimes even months), imagining I am explaining something to a good non-scientist friend. Then I sit down and quickly transcribe that. Quick proofread. Click “Publish”.
Like every other skill, writing needs practice. Write every day, something, anything. That’s what makes the blog useful – you have a platform for your words every day. You’ll get better. When you write something for publication, watch carefully what the editor changed in your manuscript and learn from it. Read a lot of good writing, paying attention to how other writers accomplish their goals.
The hard-line “never write for free” slogan is a hold-over from some old, outdated times. Early on in your career, you will write for free quite a lot, especially on your blog. Your blog becomes your portfolio, your PR material. As you become a professional, you will learn how to reject offers to write for free, and will mostly write for pay. But even then, there will be times when you will want to write for free – on your own blog (or your Mom’s neighborhood newsletter). You will want to experiment with a new form, or a new topic. Or you will want to write something that would be hard to sell. Or you wrote something on commission, got rejected, got paid your kill-fee, and now want to see your work out there, meeting the readers.
Or, if you are a natural born writer, every now and then there will be a story inside of you, fighting to burst out of your chest and get expressed in words or visuals, and you won’t care if it’s paid or not, you want it out, and your blog will be there waiting for just such pieces.
Getting started with your blog
It’s easy. Go to WordPress.com (or some other platform, but WordPress has recently become a standard and is probably your best bet) and start one. Pick a name (and a URL) that is catchy, memorable yet informative about the main topic of the blog. Make at least some minimal effort to make it look pretty. Fill out the ‘About Me’ page, put buttons for your various social media accounts on the sidebar, and provide a method for readers to contact you. Start posting.
Get in a rhythm – decide you will post something on your blog every day or every week and stick to it. Sometimes, it will just be a few links or a YouTube video. Other times, you will write something more substantial. Start with book reviews – those are relatively easy. Do Q&As with scientists. Cover new papers in “ResearchBlogging” fashion. One day a seriously good post will come out of all your daily thinking in the shower and during dog walks.
If you make a statement, link to the source or to additional information. If you quote somebody, provide the link to the original context (including audio file or transcript if you yourself did the interview). A quote with a link increases your trust with the readers. A quote without a link decreases your trust with the readers – it’s a red flag that you are trying to manipulate them. And always try to link to the scientific papers you write about, even if they are behind paywalls.
It is also OK to just write guest posts on other people’s blogs. A number of science blogging networks have designated guest blogs for just such occasions. We here have two such blogs – Guest Blog and MIND Guest Blog – but other bloggers on the network may also sometimes accept a guest post.
Even if you run your own blog, it is not a bad idea to occasionally write a really good one for a Guest Blog on a media-owned network. A post on our Guest Blog counts as a clip in your portfolio, is highly visible, will show up high on Google searches for your name, and thus will serve you well as your promotional material when you start pitching or applying for jobs.
You can find a number of good links about getting started, and about running your blog, on this wiki page.
Get some professional training
If you are further along in your career (e.g., research career) you may feel too old to waste another year or two of your life by going back to school. But if you are younger, e.g., just out of college, you may want to consider getting a Master’s at one of the specialized Science, Health and Environmental Reporting/Writing programs. There are several excellent programs to choose from, e.g., NYU, UCSC, MIT, UGA, UNC, USC, City University (London), UW-Madison and several others.
If that is too long (or expensive) for you, spend a summer at a science writing workshop, e.g., Banff or Santa Fe.
Or, if you are still in school, take some writing or journalism classes despite not needing them officially for your major.
Try to get an internship, perhaps in one of the popular science magazines. Nothing prepares you better than learning on the job.
Attend meetings with professional writing and journalism workshops, talks, panels and discussions, e.g,. ScienceWriters (NASW/CASW), ScienceOnline (either the annual flagship meeting in Raleigh, or one of the growing number of satellite events), AAAS annual meeting, SpotOn, or WCSJ. Use the opportunity to get to know (and get known by) editors and others whose careers are well in advance of yours, but also to meet your own peers and start forming your own posse of ‘Friends In Low Places’. Many of those events also have “Pitch sessions” where you can pitch your story ideas directly to editors.
Read good science blogging by setting up ScienceSeeker as your homepage. Find out which blogs you like, subscribe to them, post comments, perhaps start out your own blogging by emulating their style until you develop your own.
Shameless Self-Promotion
If a blog post is published in a forest,….?
OK, you’ve been blogging for a while and now you are happy with your posts. You are ready for readers and their feedback. How do you get the readers to your blog? Good readers, with relevant interests and backgrounds, those who can provide valuable feedback?
First things first. Make your blog an official science blog by applying to have it aggregated at ScienceSeeker. ScienceSeeker is a portal for science writing and blogging, a result of fusion and then further development of Scienceblogging.org and Researchblogging.org (COI: I am one of the founders of ScienceSeeker, which is a ScienceOnline project). It keeps getting developed and adding new features.
Neither Google Blogsearch nor Technorati are good at filtering science blogs. They pull in spam blogs, blogs with a science tag that have no science content whatsoever, as well as blogs that push pseudoscience, anti-science, medical quakery and other silly or dangerous nonsense. As only approved science blogs can be found at ScienceSeeker, it has unofficially become a ‘stamp of approval’, a way to filter out the noise and focus on the quality content that one can filter in various ways, from topical filters, to only posts covering papers, to ‘Editors’ Picks’. A number of journal publishers and media organizations are now using ScienceSeeker to get metrics on how much their articles were blogged about. In its effort to preserve science blogs for posterity, Library Of Congress is using Science Seeker as the filtering mechanism guiding their decisions what to preserve. So get your blog on there. It will bring you reputation, traffic, and just the right kinds of readers to provide you with feedback.
Register and become a respected user on sites like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and/or Fark. Be sure you know their policies well (e.g., Reddit will let only a small proportion of your links be to your own work). Don’t waste too much time on those sites, but you can use them to find interesting links to share, to share other people’s work, and to occasionally share links to your own posts and articles. If one of your posts catches fire on one of those sites, make sure your server can take it, and be present – you will be busy for a few hours moderating comments, deleting especially obnoxious, snarky, nasty or idiotic ones. But some comments will be good, and a small proportion out of those tens of thousands of visitors will bookmark you, keep coming back and will become your regular readers.
Have a nice-looking homepage (you can make it with WordPress, or use a specialized platform like About.Me, or pay a designer friend to make you one). Your homepage should have a short, easy to remember URL so you can shout it out on the street and people will be able to spell it, remember it, and find it later when they go online that night. This is your single most important URL that you will place everywhere – on your business cards, and on profile pages on all the social media and other sites that let you have a profile. Everywhere you are online should link back to your homepage. And your homepage should link to everywhere else you are online.
Your blog can serve as your homepage, or be a prominent and central part of your homepage. If not, make sure your homepage prominently links to your external blog. Make sure your homepage has a well written and accurate About/Bio page, contact information, link to your CV, and your Portfolio with links to all of your published work (perhaps your photography or videos or art on separate tabs). And of course, provide links to all the social media where you have accounts.
If you are lucky, you will be invited to join a blogging network, which makes your blog even more visible. If you are VERY lucky, you will be invited to move your blog to a media site as a blogger/columnist, like Ezra Klein at Washington Post, Nate Silver at NYTimes, or the Phenomena quartet at National Geographic.
If you are just embarking on the professional career in science writing, we can help right here at The SA Incubator. Khalil and I post our weekly “Picks” – if you have written something you are proud of, don’t be shy to send the link to us. If we like it, we’ll link to it. Then we may ask you to do one of the “Introducing” Q&As, a great opportunity to present your past career, skills, links and goals that will turn out very high on Google searches once potential employers start googling you.
The necessity of social media
There are many social networks out there, some general some specialized, as well as platforms which include some social media elements. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, Picassa, YouTube, Vimeo, DeviantArt, Instagram, Pinterest, FriendFeed, Branch, Quora, Goodreads, MySpace, LiveJournal, Orkut, Diaspora, SoundCloud, Slideshare, Storify, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley, FigShare, CiteULike, and many more. Which ones to use? I suggest you use one or two that fit you best, but also take a few minutes to set up profiles on many other networks. That way, people who find you on those sites can click on the link and find themselves on your homepage, where they can see where you are really active.
This wiki has a lot of great resources for starting out and using a number of those sites professionally, as a scientist or a science writer. Pay special attention to the pages about Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, as those are the three biggies you should probably pay most attention to.
Let’s focus on Twitter now. It is essential for a journalist. Not having – and using – a Twitter account today is like not having an email address ten years ago (and yes, some cutting-edge people are completely abandoning email and doing all of their communications over social media).
Big companies have suffered losses because their old-timey PR teams were unaware of the backlash on social media, and then incapable of responding correctly on social media. Businesses can lose money if they are missing key information that appears only on social media. Academia is especially horribly insulated and way behind the times. But nowhere is use of social media as important as in journalism. Don’t be this guy who was completely oblivious that his newspaper was in the center of national maelstrom of harsh criticism, because “I only deal with what’s on paper”.
When an airplane skidded off the runway in Denver, I knew it, along with 100,000s of other people, 12 minutes before everyone else. A passenger tweeted about it, and it spread like wildfire, including his updates, blurry photos, etc. CNN had a brief piece 12 minutes later. The accidental “citizen journalist” scooped them. Sometimes, for some news, these 12 minutes may be crucial for you.
Twitter and Facebook were key methods of communication not just between participants, but also to the outside world, during the Mumbai attacks and the Arab Spring.
Journalists who observed the massive, instant, intense and scathing reactions of experts to #arseniclife or #Encode did not make the mistake of filing their positive stories and then having to backpedal later.
If all you see on Twitter is garbage, you are following the wrong people. You have to carefully choose who to follow, and then learn how to filter. Unfollowing is easy, and polite. You are not dissing your Mom, as if you would if you unfriended her on Facebook.
Don’s use Twitter.com. Use an app. There is a lot of outcry right now (by myself as well) about the imminent demise of some Tweetdeck apps (version 0.38.2 is by far the best, if you can have it and keep it indefinitely – other apps are OK on smartphones, e.g., HootSuite or Twitterific). It is important to me not to have Twitter/Tweetdeck as yet another tab in my browser, a place where I have to go and spend time. Twitter is not a site to go to and spend time on. Twitter should be a part of the workflow, silently running in the back, behind my open browser.
Tweets show up in the corner and 99% of the time I do not even notice them. I am busy with something else, and I mentally block them out. But I have a “search image” (a term from ethology – a bird does not systematically scan every inch of tree bark, instead it has a search image for the shape and color of its prey insect and automatically homes in on it). If a tweet shows up with my name in it, or a specific word in it, or by a specific person, I will notice and take a glance. If there is nothing important, I only lost 1/10th of a second and can go back to what I was doing. If it seems important, I will Favorite the tweet (if unsure of the quality of content) or Retweet it (if it comes from a trusted source), so I can have it saved to read later. If it seems important and urgent, I will click through and investigate. Perhaps this is information that is more important to me than whatever else I happen to be doing at the time. And even then, I will probably spend only a few minutes on it before returning to whatever I was doing before.
In Tweetdeck (or any similar app), one should have a number of columns – move them around: the default position may not the the best one for you (I move “All Friends” far away to the right so I don’t have to see it almost ever). Mentions and Direct Messages are your more important columns, but also make several that follow Lists (your own, or other people’s), or display tweets that contain particular words or hashtags (your “Saved Searches”). I will add a column for an event hashtag while the event is on, then delete the column afterward. Play around until you refine your filtering this way.
Here are some good lists to get you started – follow them, and also follow some of the listed people directly – you decide who is useful to you:
If there is something I’d like to tweet out, that is easy, too. No need to go to Twitter. Get some kind of Bit.ly or AddThis bookmarklet for your browser and you can tweet any link in two clicks (perhaps with a little editing, to add/remove stuff from the tweet so it’s just the way you want it).
What kind of stuff you can – and perhaps should – do on Twitter? There are several different things. First, you can just use it to find information, to pick up good links, or to eavesdrop on conversations. Treat it as a river of news – sometimes you dip in, sometimes you go away. You won’t miss much while you are away. If information is really important, it will have staying power – many people will still be linking to it, retweeting it, and discussing it next time you log in. If you missed it – it’s not important.
You can, of course, post your personal musings, but if you are going to use Twitter like a professional, keep that to the minimum. I bet less than 1% of my tweets are in this vein.
You can retweet others. Your followers do not see everything tweeted by everyone you follow. Twitter is very asymmetrical – you don’t follow those who follow you, not automatically. You follow those who are useful to you, and you are followed by people who find you useful. Thus, if someone tweets, and you retweet, this will be fresh to many of your followers. If they RT in turn, they will spread it to their followers and so on, in concentric circles, spreading the message out further and further. A tweet can go a long way.
You can engage in conversations. It’s OK to butt into other people’s conversations, but be polite and be useful and constructive. If you know the answer to someone’s question, provide it. If you are at a University and have library access, you can help your freelance colleagues in search of papers – they will use the hashtag #Icanhazpdf (but first carefully read the comment section of this post to understand the legal, moral and etiquette aspects of it).
You can be a useful filter for others. Post links to good articles and blog posts. Everyone tweets links to NYTimes, BBC and The Guardian – you don’t have to. Instead, set up Google (and Google News and Google Blogsearch) alerts for the keywords in the domain of your expertise and interest. It can be “watersheds” or “science+superheros” (one of mine is “circadian”, naturally). Some of those links in the alerts will be very interesting, yet from obscure publications. People will soon realize you are the “go to” person for that topic. Follow a few good by less-well-known blogs. Tweet out links to their posts.
Broadcast links to your own posts. But do it politely and judiciously. Tweet once in the morning. Then again that day “for the afternoon crowd”, then once next day “for those who missed it yesterday”. That should be sufficient. DM (direct message) the link to a few people with more followers than you have but who are aware of you and know who you are. Ask them to take a look, provide feedback, and they are likely to retweet it if they like it.
Here are some quick rules you should memorize on how to be a useful and respectable contributor to social media.
And finally, if you are really well organized and dedicated, you can truly use Twitter as a part of your journalistic flow – from individual tweets, to aggregations of tweets – both your own and replies you got (e.g., on Facebook or Storify), to longer blog posts, to magazine articles, to books.
Moving on to Facebook, the strangest animal of them all, undergoing a metamorphosis every year or so, often abruptly changing people’s privacy settings, expectations and experiences. That makes many people uneasy about it.
You have to be sensitive that there are two main styles of Facebook use. One is personal, the other is professional. It is perfectly OK to keep settings to ‘Private’ and to friend only family and best friends, share vacation pictures and not much else. It is perfectly OK if you prefer to use it that way. But perhaps you should set up another Facebook Page for your professional outreach. This is where you post interesting science links, urge other scientists, writers, journalists and bloggers to follow your page. Keep the two worlds separate.
Many people, including myself, do not separate the two worlds. Yes, I occasionally post personal stuff, but I mainly post links to science stories on my personal profile, which is set completely on ‘Public’. I have many FB friends, and of them many are not inherently interested in science. By being my FB friends, they get served their daily dose of science anyway. Many are thankful for this. This is the so-called “push” method of science communication, where you push science onto unsuspecting audiences. The reverse is “pull” method, in which people who are already interested in your stuff will know how to seek you and find you if they know your stuff is good (people interested in science know where to look for Scientific American).
There is a lot of scientifically incorrect information floating around Facebook. One of your roles can be as a “downer” – the person who brings in a link to the scientific information that corrects the pseudoscience. And yes, your aunt may get really angry at you because of it, but at least some of aunt’s FB friends will learn something from your link, perhaps share it elsewhere.
And now the elephant in the room – Google Plus. It is not easy to figure out what it is and how to use it and how to find good stuff on it. But if you are using any Google product (e.g., Gmail) you are already on G+ even if you are not using it. Thus, it has tons of people on there already. And unlike some past Google experiments (like Google Buzz and Google Wave), this one does not appear to be going anywhere – it is here to stay, and it’s a monster. I have more G+ subscribers than Twitter followers or FB friends. Most of them have zero background in science. The least you can do is throw some science links at them, even if you do not have time to engage further. Lots of traffic comes from there, so it’s worth a second or two to plop in a link.
What is important to know is that scientists, science bloggers and writers were some of the early invitees to the Beta version of G+ before public launch. They have explored the platform from the very early days. There are many of them there, and many are active. They are experimenting with new functionalities, especially cool uses for Google Hangouts. Find “Scientists” circles and start following people. Even if you don’t engage with it fully now, keep an eye on it, keep your presence on it, I would not bet against Google that this will wither and die.
Next step
You are writing every day. You are blogging regularly. After six months of regular Twitter use, you now have some followers and interaction. Perhaps you joined a popular group blog or even a blogging network. You have a few guest blog posts elsewhere, perhaps a few clips from school or local papers, or when you did an internship. It’s time to start pitching.
Different editors have different preferences for pitches. But many will explore your blog, your prior clips, your social media activity (potential employers for staff jobs will do that very thoroughly).
If you pitch me for the Guest Blog, for example, and I have never heard of you before, you need to write me a longish, polished pitch. Show me that you can write, that you can write a pitch just as perfectly as you will write the article itself later on.
But if I know you from your blog, from Twitter, perhaps some previous work, you don’t need to do that. You can DM me on Twitter with a very brief pitch and I am likely to say Yes.
The ScienceOnlineNOW website is now live. This will be the hub, the central place, for all of our activities.
ScienceOnlineNOW is the home of ScienceOnline, a non-profit organization that facilitates discussion about science through online networks and face-to-face events.
From there, you will be able to access the archives of the past conferences, including ScienceOnline2012 (and its wiki), ScienceOnline2011 (wiki), and soon, once we put all the pieces together, the archives of saved information about the older conferences (2007-2010). You’ll find all the relevant news and updates on all of our activities.
Our community is growing. The main event in Raleigh is not capable of hosting everyone who would like to come. So people in our community decided to organize their own events modeled after ScienceOnline and following its core principles.
This year for the first time, there will be three ScienceOnline events (or series of events) on the West Coast – in Seattle, Vancouver, and the Bay Area.
On April 13th, 2013, there will be the first Science Online Teen in New York City – stay tuned for more.
Our online tools
Over the past few years, we have developed a couple of online aggregators for science news, specifically for science coverage on blogs. First we built Science Blogging Aggregated (aka Scienceblogging.org) (learn more), a relatively simple aggregator of feeds from major science blogging networks, group blogs and news blogs.
A little later, we developed a more complex aggregator – ScienceSeeker.org (learn more). We keep developing it further – it now has many of the functionalities of ResearchBlogging.org, plus ways to filter the information in various ways.
We intend to develop it further – adding additional sources of science news, conversation and information pooled from other, non-blog platforms, including traditional media sources, social networks, and more.
But the most important new development in our plans is the Science Concierge, an advanced search engine with a human editor touch, including a system for micropayments, microgrants and crowdfunding for science communicators and others. This would enable readers to financially reward writers, granters to be matched with grantees for various projects in science communication, education, citizen science, small research projects and more.
But building this takes time, effort, skill and money. Thus, we have applied for some grants recently. For one of these grants YOU can help us. We have applied for the Knight News Challenge. Proposals that get most “Likes”, shares, reblogs and comments have the greatest chance of getting funded, so please go to our proposal and give it some love! Thank you!
And stay tuned – more updates will be coming soon.
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Invitation to the NRC opening - click to see large!
The new Nature Research Center (NRC), a technology wing of the existing North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, is opening on April 20, 2012. Everyone is invited! Invitation attached (click on the image left)!!! It will be a 24-hour science party! There will be live feeds in the SECU Daily Planet multi-media theater from scientists around the planet, ongoing activities in each research lab by our own “rock-star” NRC scientists, food and events related to science, and citizen science take-home ideas. …. and More. My recent article in the Observer summarizes all the stats about the NRC — read and enjoy!
The theme of the new NRC is “how we know what we know.” All exhibits explain how scientists work to solve mysteries that affect our daily lives. The Daily Planet is four stories high, and the giant Earth-shaped structure houses a round multimedia theater featuring global science adventures. Awesome footage, ranging from exploration of forest canopies to digging up ancient dinosaur bones, will be broadcast. Schools can attend live presentations, or access recordings through an extensive virtual library.
The NRC also features citizen science, where the public can engage in science affecting our lives. Analyze the water in your local stream? Check out your DNA? Monitor birds in your backyard? Measure black holes in outer space? Students, classes, citizens, and legislators will be welcome to visit our Investigate Labs to participate in ongoing research. Education staff will help you experience the excitement of discovery. The new wing features a Science Café which is modeled along the lines of a sports bar – except all the TV screens will feature live feeds from science around the world.
Canopymeg with the heirs of Ethiopia's forests -- kids who are disciples of the Coptic church take on the stewardship of conservation in this unique situation where the last forest fragments exist in church yards, otherwise called "church forests".
My passion continues to be mentoring youth in science, especially minorities, and also global forest conservation. I hope the new NRC will offer role models for kids from all walks of life, so that diverse youth are inspired to seek careers in science. During my own childhood, I never had a woman science teacher throughout my career, which made me pretty anxious at times about pursuing ecology as a career. I hope that the emerging generation will never experience that anxiety.
My other passion is conserving global forests. Not only are they the lungs of the planet, but they are also the drug stores, the carbon storage agents, the climate control, the gas exchange headquarters, the biodiversity libraries and the spiritual and cultural meccas of many societies. My recent work in Ethiopia was just published in a short piece in Science Magazine (hooray!) and has seen some great success with the simple solution of working together with the local priests to build stone walls around their church yards which house the last remaining forest patches in Northeastern Ethiopia (read more on my website). Read more in my recent nature column.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am totally excited about using social media as a “hook” to get young people engaged in science at our NRC. Our new and amazing Science Communication Director, Dr. DavidKroll, is awesome in creating these pathways and it is a privilege to work with him on this. With his blogging and all of our staff’s global research and outreach, we should be twittering and facebooking and blogging our way into many K-12 classrooms as well as into folks’ everyday lives with exciting science and more science!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best part of Sci Online is always the people – I would also love to see a Techno-Geek table next year, where those of us in mid-career can get a tune-up to make sure our mobile phones are tweeting and facebooking to our best capabilities. Little things like image size and how to transmit videos make a big difference in our science communication. I would also love to host something at our SECU Daily Planet technology theater at the NRC next year, where we actually take some of the rock-star attendees of the conference, and broadcast our own TED series to students around the state and the country, using our internet capabilities and cool visual technologies.
Looking forward to 2013!
Thank you! See you at the NRC opening and at ScienceOnline2013!
Posted onFebruary 22, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Tomorrow in Charlotte: “How the Web is Changing the Way Science Is Communicated, Taught and Done.”
I will be giving a public talk about the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done on the campus of UNC Charlotte, tomorrow, Thursday February 23rd, at 6:30 p.m. in the Bioinformatics Lecture Room 105.
If you can, come to the talk, don’t be shy to approach me and say Hello, and perhaps join us for dinner and drinks afterward.
On your way to ScienceOnline2012, your plane finally lands at Raleigh-Durham International airport. While you slowly taxi to the gate, what do you do? Naturally, you turn on your smart-phone, open up your favorite Twitter app, and announce to the world: “#scio12 – I have landed at RDU. Anyone else here? Want to share a ride to the hotel?”.
If you are lucky, you’ll find a couple of other attendees have landed at about the same time, so you meet them at the baggage claim (fortunately, Terminal 1 is under renovation so everyone had to land at the same over-crowded Terminal 2), and share a shuttle or cab into town.
This is the first moment of serendipitous meetings, as you introduce yourselves to each other, who are you, where you come from, what you do, what brings you to ScienceOnline… you just made your first #scio12 friends.
Twenty minutes later, your taxi pulls up at the Doubletree/Brownstone hotel. As you and your fellow passengers exit the car and start gathering your luggage, this tall, skinny, bespectacled, excitable creature runs out of the hotel, waiving his arms, and starts hugging everyone. Oh, that must be Bora! So, you get a hug. And naturally, the next thing you do is take your iPhone out again and tweet: “#scio12 has officially started: #IhuggedBora!”
And so the adventure begins… (most of the images in this post are thumbnails – click to see them larger)
The Close-contact community
In 2007 we met at UNC. The following four years, we convened at the wonderfully scienc-ey Sigma Xi. This year we moved to McKimmon Center at NCSU. We keep moving to bigger spaces, but our community keeps getting larger, so the density remains high. Thus, wherever we met, we were always tightly close together, rubbing shoulders with each other. There are hugs (not just with me, but among others).
This is me, getting a hug from the NCSU chancellor – photo by Tim Skellet:
There is some (though controversial) research showing that hugging and close contact increase mutual trust, thus strengthening the community. Close proximity to friends, by increasing oxytocin levels, may help people get bolder, perhaps speak up at conferences, which is a good thing at unconferences like ours.
But there is a flip-side to this coin. Strengthening of bonds within an in-group weakens the bonds to people outside of it. If you are all hugged-out at #scio12, are you then suspicious of perfectly nice passers-by on the streets of Raleigh as you are walking to a restaurant? Are you going to tip your waitress less because she is not a part of the in-group? Are you more unpleasant when replying to emails, tweets or blog comments by people who are not at the conference? We certainly do not want that side-effect to happen!
And then there is the question of new people at the meeting. As veterans, now old friends, hug each other (and me), do the newbies feel left out? Are they now out-group and treated as such by the in-group? Judging from the feedback, generally not, but at least initially some may feel that way until they realize how welcome they are by everyone else. Those are some hard questions we want to ask (and I asked a few times on Twitter after the conference), because we do not want anyone to feel left out – at the conference physically, or watching from afar online.
The introvert reaction to #IhuggedBora
With the fast growth of the conference, there were more newbies attending this year than repeat offenders veterans. This had a potential of changing the atmosphere of the conference, so we did our best to prepare the new people, as well as to recruit the veterans to actively welcome new people to the community. Blog posts by Pascale, Zuska, Janet and me, as well as asking the question on Twitter, we hope, helped new people prepare better for what they will be experiencing. The “SXSW of science”, “SciFoo, but democratic”, The Bonnaroo of the Blogosphere, or “Burning Man for scientists” – those are some comparisons made with ScienceOnline over the years (and see for yourself), so we wanted to make sure that new attendees understood this well in advance.
But not everyone is ready for such a close-contact and furiously-paced event. Some people are introverted. Others are shy. Some may be both introverted and shy. Some may be suffering from the impostor syndrome at the beginning, not knowing if they fully belong to this community. Some are not active on Twitter (or not on Twitter at all – 64 did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form, and most of them I could not find there with searching either) and thus may not know the rest of the community well yet.
I probably have mild Aspergers (not diagnosed, but people who know me very well – including a psychiatrist – agree that all signs are there), so had to spend decades studying people’s body language and training myself to recognize subtle cues and respond appropriately. As people walk in, especially new people, I have to quickly figure out if the person will be comfortable getting a hug from me or not. I don’t want to assault anyone, or make anyone uncomfortable. I had to make fast to-hug-or-not-to-hug decisions on the fly, and I hope my success rate is not too bad. So some people got a handshake or a nice word instead. Some of the same people gave me spontaneous hugs three days later, some did not. I want everyone to be comfortable and to get the most they can from the conference. Not everyone is here in order to become my personal friend (Dunbar be damned) and that is OK.
But not getting hugged may make people feel like they are not a part of the in-group. Perhaps there is a hugged circle, and an un-hugged outside group. This would be against the ethos of our meeting, but this is the BlogTogether spirit that was the original inspiration to the conference – that being in the same space as others, with hugging or handshakes or just eye contact, helps us know more about each other and affects our online relationships. But I want to try something different next year. I have no idea how and when #IhuggedBora tradition started (a couple of years ago), and it is fun, and I like it, and many others like it. But there should be a way for non-hugged people to feel just as welcome. Perhaps a second hashtag?
Someone on Twitter suggested high-fiving. But then I remembered when I first arrived in the USA I was unfamiliar with the gesture. I worked at a horse farm, working with young horses in the mornings and teaching riding school in the afternoons. There were a couple of big, burly guys working at the barn, feeding horses and such. They would come down the aisle of the barn, raise their hands and say “Hi, five” and I would step to the side and do this:
Hi Five!
I had no idea I was supposed to come toward them and that our palms were supposed to meet! Obviously, a cultural difference…
Perhaps this Web-savvy community has seen the “Like” button enough times to understand the “thumbs-up” gesture (despite the thumbs-up gesture being considered rude in some cultures)?
Thumbs up!
We have a year to think about this, and welcome all of your feedback, but we will definitely ponder a number of ideas on how to make the event more comfortable for people who are new, shy, introvert, or just plain exhausted and overstimulated.
Perhaps we can designate a “silent room” where there is no talking, where people can come in for a few minutes to recharge their batteries (both their mental batteries, and those charging their elecronic devices), get online and write in peace, perhaps take a nap, meditate, do some yoga….the Cafe room is awesome for interactions, but it is anything but quiet.
We may also try to do some veteran-n00b pairings ahead of time, essentially providing each new attendee (or at least the students, or people who indicate at registration they would like this) with a “go to” person for questions and help, perhaps starting the conference with an event designed to get the pairs to meet each other for a few minutes. A broader, speed-meeting rotation (like speed-dating events) to get people to break the ice and talk to someone new, may also be considered.
At ScienceWriters meetings, there are all sorts of ribbons one can attach to the name-tag, including “first-timer” and “talk to me”, the latter indicating a veteran willing to field questions or help the new people. Perhaps we can do something similar.
And of course, serendipitous meetings of small groups of new people are already embedded in the program – random banquet seating, bus rides to and from the hotel, tours you sign up for without knowing who else will be going there with you, chairs all over the Cafe room and the main hallway, parties at the hotel, going out for dinner at a restaurant – opportunities for talking to new people one-on-one or in small groups are numerous.
Obviously, we are obsessed with details. Not just because it frees you up to focus on the proceedings, but because not paying attention to detail can actively hinder and spoil the experience for some people.
Diversity
We had attendees from 40 states of the USA (if you count D.C. as a state), five Canadian provinces, and seven other countries.
Unsurprisingly for the host state that is a hotbed of science and technology, North Carolina was represented by 119 people (plus four locals who snuck in for a single session without registering, but that is OK). There were 56 attendees from New York, 34 from California, 21 from Massachussets, 15 from Washington D.C., 14 from Maryland, 13 from Virginia, 12 from Illinois, and 10 from Wisconsin. There were also representatives from Pennsylvania (9), Washington State (8), Minnesota (7), Florida and Colorado (6 each), Arizona, Indiana, Montana and Connecticut (5 each), Ohio and Texas (4 each), Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Utah (2 each), and one person each from Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Maine, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.
Canadians were represented by 8 Ontarians, 4 people from British Columbia, 3 from Alberta, and one each from Quebec and Nova Scotia. From other continents, we had 13 guests from the U.K., 5 from Germany, two from Denmark, and one each from the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Mauritius. Of course, those are people’s current addresses. If we asked for the place of origin, it would have been even more geographically distributed (Peru, Hong Kong, Costa Rica…). After all, Nadja Popovich and I spoke Serbian to each other at the conference, as we were both born in Belgrade (which also continues the tradition of having someone from Serbia every year)…
The diversity of people attending ScienceOnline, in terms of geography, gender, race, ethnicity or culture, means that everyone brought something different to the meeting – different background, history and culture, different angles and goals and needs. While here, they cross-fertilized their ideas, told their stories and learned from others. This also means that people have gone home to all those distant places and are now sharing what they learned, teaching, influencing their colleagues, neighbors and students, thus enlarging this community even more.
On the wearing of many hats
According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers (high time to defenestrate the notion that this is a ‘bloggers conference’ when half the people don’t blog), 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.
Thus, the success in cross-fertilization of ideas at ScienceOnline is not just due to it being a rare event bringing together people who do different things in science, e.g,. researchers, teachers, journalists, bloggers, web developers, publishers, public information officers, librarians, artists, historians, students, etc. but because almost everyone at the meeting is currently (or has experiences in the past of being) in multiple roles. Not because people here wear different hats, but because everyone wears many hats.
There was an interesting moment at the end of the closing plenary panel, moderated by David Kroll with panelists Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin and myself. Someone in the audience grumbled that the scientists were not represented on the panel. David and I looked at each other in puzzlement. David just boxed up his lab equipment a couple of weeks before the event, moving from full-time research to full-time communication. How is he so suddenly not a scientist any more?
Although most of us at ScienceOnline play multiple roles, it seems that people have an automatic tendency to assign only a single “profession” to each other, mainly guided by the most recent place of employment. Some people think of me as a freewheeling, provocative blogger. Others think of me as a ‘journalist’ because I am an editor at a respected media entity. Others think of me primarily as an educator because I teach BIO101 to adult students and blog my lecture notes and am a Visiting Faculty at NYU school of journalism.
I am all of that, for sure. But if you forced me to identify myself with just a single word, I would easily choose this one: “scientist”. Just because I haven’t messed around a lab for a decade does not mysteriously make me a non-scientist. ‘Once a scientist always a scientist’, because being a scientist is not a profession but a worldview. I cannot quit being a scientist now. Not to mention that I still have research collaborations that occasionally lead to publication. Which is why I tend to take the scientists’ side in various scientists vs. journalists debates.
The realization, after the conference already ended, that we are all a bunch of misfits, pioneers, and generally crazy risk-takers, led to an amazing new hashtag – #IamScience. Inspired by unlikely career trajectory of Mireya Mayor, our keynote speaker, Kevin Zelnio finally let it all out – an incredible and courageous story of his life and how he got into science, and into and out of a research career. Hundreds of tweets, and dozens of blog posts are being now assembled on a Tumblr blog, while Allie Wilkinson started a photo-Tumblr with pictures of scientists – This Is What A Scientist Looks Like – and Mindy Weisberger put together a video:
There are many blog posts already posted, some old some new, and here is just a small sample of posts I could find most easily: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
It seems that #scio12 attendees are not the only ones with unusual and circuitous career trajectories in and out of science. Perhaps the “usual” path is the most unusual of all. There is a lesson in this somewhere….
Move aside, C.P.Snow, we bridged dozens of cultures
Writing text is not the only way of communicating science. And it can only reach certain audiences. There are many other ways to communicate science, either independently or in conjunction with text, each method potentially reaching a different segment of the target population: art, illustration, photography, maps, data visualization, sounds, music, animation, video, games…possibilities are endless.
We’ve always had sessions on art and video, but this year we really upped the ante. There was a whole slew of workshops on art, photography, data visualization, making maps, makingvideos, etc, and many sessions discussed the relationship between science and various areas of art, photography and music.
Artists submitted their art for the Art Contest. Their submissions were projected on a screen in the Cafe room and were given prizes in the end. Videographers, likewise, sent in their work ahead of time and their videos were projected during the Film Festival, again with prizes.
Maggie Pingolt, Russ Creech and Brian Crawford took most of the “official” photos at the conference, but others did their share as well. Probably the most popular was the #youhavebeenframed series – many of the people in those photos now use the images as their new Twitter avatars.
If you look at Flickr sets tagged with scio12 or scienceonline2012 or YouTube videos tagged with scio12, you will see that many participants used the conference to practice their skills – some with amazing results.
Podcasts are still coming out, but listen to Nadja Popovich’s official ones here. Finally, several videos were made at the venue, some still in production, some embedded into this post, others easily found on YouTube.
And then….oh my! Some attendees decided to make art permanent, on their own bodies! They went to Dogstar Tattoo Company for a Science Ink tour. After hearing Carl Zimmer talk about the history of tattooing, and having his book signed, several participants got their own tattoos (less courageous of us got temporary tattoos, provided to everyone at registration).
From the Raleigh News & Observer: Rebecca Guenard, center, and Russ Creech, left, watch as Christie Wilcox, who is getting her PHd at the University of Hawaii, gets a lionfish tattoo from Kathryn Moore at Dogstar Tattoo Company in Durham Friday, January 20, 2012. Wilcox is one of the attendees in the ScienceOnline2012 conference in Raleigh.
And it is not just art – history, philosophy, sociology, ethics, politics, mathematics, literary narrative and humor kept cropping up in many sessions and events, some dedicated to it, some not. Music had its own session, but also made an appearance in discussion of crafting a longform narrative, in a session on data journalism, and in discussions of video. And at the Open Mic, we could see that many scientists and science communicators have tremendousmusical talents.
Math had its own two sessions and two Blitz-talks, yet also invaded many other talks and sessions, from narrative to altmetrics. I doubt anyone at #scio12 is such a stereotypical data-robot not to be moved and impressed by this interweaving of a whole slew of ‘cultures’. After all, it’s all about context. Person most excited exiting the altmetrics Blitz-talk was a historian! If years of library digging – stuff that makes a PhDs in history – can be replaced by a few clicks to get patterns of citations and mentions over time, then historians can finally focus on the real deal: analysis and interpretation of such patterns. Can you imagine the time-saving and re-focus that discipline can have?
Storytelling, though part of the discussion in several sessions, also had a DIY component – the Monti storytelling show during the banquet. Humor was discussed in a dedicated session (as well as in a couple of others), and then there was Brian Malow, switching from theory to practice, doing stand-up science comedy (which also included art) during lunch.
Heck, even sports snuck in somehow – we all got an introduction to the wonderful world of curling.
To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before…
A lot of the discussion at ScienceOnline2012 was, without stating so overtly, about the distinction between push and pull strategies for reaching new audiences. We are pretty happy with what we can do – and the quality of work – at science-dedicated venues, be it the science section of NYTimes, or pop-sci magazines, or specialized science radio shows, or blogs, podcasts and websites. People working at such venues tend to be good at what they do and they tend to be… at ScienceOnline!
As the now famous diagram by Ed Yong demonstrates – the good scientists and good journalists talk to each other about bad scientists and bad journalists who are conspicuously absent. But those bad scientists and journalists have to be reached or replaced. How? They work in mass media we cannot penetrate, addressing audiences we cannot reach. How do we also get there and reach those same vast audiences with well-done science stories?
It’s hard, but it can be done. There were more than several people at the meeting who do it, daily or occasionally. They have great success and their new audiences appreciate them. The resistance mostly comes from our own ranks!
When a scientist publishes text and data in a scientific paper (especially behind a paywall), the audience is miniscule and the effect on popular understanding of science and trust in scientists is zero. But when a scientist decides to show up in the media as a source, s/he gets tagged as a “media whore” by the colleagues in the department (or in the entire discipline). The ‘Sagan-Gould effect’. If you popularize science, your research must be suspicious, right?
And if on top of appearing in traditional media you also do some of your own blogging, or engagement on social networks, the eye-rolling and ‘tsk-tsk’-ing must be endless. You may have to do this pseudonymously because your PI or your Department Head may explicitly forbid online engagement. In some places it is the government that prohibits scientists from talking to the media. It takes some courage to go ahead and do it anyway. The problem is not the audience, but one’s bosses and colleagues. People who do this anyway are at ScienceOnline. But how do we reach people who are too afraid to do this – they are too afraid to come to ScienceOnline as well!
Scientists are also chastised by their colleagues if they voice a political opinion, even if it comes to policies that directly affect them, e.g, opposing the RWA bill. The instinct to present an apolitical face is strong among scientists (as well as many journalists), with sometimes devastating consequences.
Other science communicators push the envelope by doing something else – publishing in unlikely venues or trying to reach new audiences by going where those audiences are.
You may go where the cheerleading fans are, then serve them science. The audiences love it, the traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
A reader of Playboy magazine may read it for the Vonnegut stories, but then gets served science. The target audience loves it. The traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
Your audience may go to BlogHer to get sex advice, and get served science. The audience loves it. The traditional science communicators think you are not really up to par.
Your audience may follow the links to hear some hip-hop, and there they get served science. The audiences love it, but since the traditional communicators do not grok that culture, they may not think you are good enough. Seriously?
You start pushing hard science and skepticism at the super-popular website infamous for its richness of dangerous medical quackery and ridiculous New Age pseudoscience. The audience laps it up. The traditional science communicators are skeptical.
You may have an unusual background, unusual career, unusual “looks” for a scientist, more balls and ovaries than the remaining 456 people in the room for the Keynote lecture, go where most guys have no courage to go, face certain death five times, discover a new species, still do your own lab science, are a role-model for balancing career with life as a parent, but since you are on TV, with your own show, this must mean that you are a bad scientist or no scientist at all, right? It does not matter that TV is the hardest medium to penetrate, and the hardestmedium to get science done right (it is a very male, ego-driven culture, full of people who “know what works on TV” and thus will not listen), and that we are all saying that someone’s gotta do it because everyone watches TV – that’s where the real “mass” audience is. But when someone does, and does it well, we are all up in arms? We invited Mireya to do the keynote specifically to break those biases among ourselves. It seems it worked. And everyone who got to chat with her during the remainder of the meeting has a new appreciation for her as a person with passion, for her science, for her work as a science communicator, for her groundedness and level-headedness, sense of humor and overall humanity. She’ll be back next year, as one of us, doing something fun, TBD.
If we want to reach broader audiences, we have to get out of our own comfort zones, adopt the cultures of those audiences, and serve them science wherever they are, in ways they can like and appreciate. Hard to do. But if the ScienceOnline community does not lead the way, who will? We may think, from our perspectives, that some of those cultures are imperfect for various, often valid reasons (e.g., sexism). But are we going to avoid communicating science to all the people we deem imperfect? If so, all we are left is our own echo-chamber. We need to break out of it – isn’t that what the Web is good for?
We keep saying that we should divert attention of people who are browsing the Web looking for celebrity gossip, or politics, or attractive human forms, to cool science stories instead. Let’s do even more of that! And support those of us who are trying.
Your feedback
So far, 186 out of 457 attendees responded to the feedback form. If you have not yet done so, please do it now (we’ll later have a separate feedback form for people who attended virtually).
We read your responses very carefully every year, many times throughout the year, and try to address the issues you identify, or incorporate your ideas. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us so we can always try to make the conference better than the previous year.
I take it as a sign of generally even and high quality of the program that so many sessions are picked as the “strongest point” or “highlight” of the conference, instead of one or two sessions dominating that question. On the other hand, each session that was identified as “weakest point” by some people was also touted as the best session by someone else – just goes to show that tastes differ.
This also tells me I need to work closer with moderators in making descriptions of sessions as crystal-clear as possible as to what exactly they will cover, at which level, for which audiences (though unconference format can lead to a different session anyway), so people have a better idea what to expect. And some of the feedback noted serendipity – attending a session that was very different from expected and learning a lot from it nonetheless. We are also happy that many informal events got frequent mentions as highlights – Keynote, The Monti, comedy lunch, several tours, evening at the Museum…
The reaction to the Keynote was overwhelmingly positive. Some extremely positive. About a dozen respondents (all women) replied in a similar vein – they came in with trepidation and skepticism and came out enlightened and with their worlds turned upside-down, the same reaction Zuska wrote about in public. And Janet’s banquet story was a perfect book-end to it as well. There were only three strongly negative responses, including one by a person who did not attend the Keynote or talk to Mireya in person, carefully protecting one’s a priori biases from potential challenge.
And every time we get an email notification that a new feedback form came in, we have the urge to respond, to answer your questions. I will not break your anonymity, but I can speak to some concerns in general terms. In some cases, our reaction is “Hey, we sent out this information in advance, you should have read our email messages”. In other cases we think “Oh well, we have to make sure to use ALL methods of communication, and repeatedly so, and not hope that one tl:dr email and a few tweets are sufficient.
Different people have different communications habits, and different personal schedules (travel, work, teaching, ups and downs in ability to respond), so each piece of information needs to be sent out multiple times by email, Twitter, G+, Facebook, blog, etc., in order to reach everyone and make sure that everyone has all the information in timely manner. As I noted above, 64 attendees did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form (and most of those really are not on Twitter), while some others may use it rarely, or are new to the platform and still do not know how to follow hashtags and lists well. So Twitter, while it reaches most of our participants, does not reach 100% and we need to keep that in mind.
For many other questions, comments and suggestions in the forms, we have a generic response: “Yes, we wanted to do that, but could not due to reasons X, Y and Z”, where X = insufficient funds, Y = insufficient time/manpower, and Z = there are legal or administrative barriers to doing this.
– Hotel. It would be great (and so much easier for us and everyone) if all the attendees were housed at the same hotel. We’ll try to do that for next year. Now that Doubletree has survived us once, saw that we can fill the hotel during off-season, make a little noise but no damage, and can clean up the bar supplies every night, I bet they will like to have us back again next year (though not sure they have enough room for all of us). We can negotiate with them earlier in the year for more rooms for everyone.
– Shuttles. We’d love to have more buses going at more times, but that is an extremely expensive part of our budget. As a quarter of our attendees are locals, we can try to summon them to do more carpooling of guests next time. Or if a good sponsor comes along, we can perhaps provide more buses.
– Banquet. It is absolutely wonderful working with the McKimmon crew and the NCSU people. It is due to them that we could have a small miracle of actually serving alcoholic drinks at the banquet. McKimmon is on state property and has to abide by state laws and regulations. Serving alcohol requires a lot of paperwork being approved by several layers of bureaucracy, but our hosts helped us navigate that potential quagmire with grace and ease.
As you know, Doubletree/Brownstone hotel was just renovated… except the ballroom which is still under renovation. By this time next year, their ballroom will be looking good again, so perhaps we can have the banquet there, allowing us to spend more time there, have a greater variety of food and drinks, and not worry about transportation to and from it. This can have an additional effect of bringing the locals to the hotel bar to mingle with the guests from out of town a little more.
– Technical stuff. There were some glitches in some sessions – screens going up, laptops requiring passwords we were not given etc. Happens when one moves to a new building after four years of intimate familiarity with every detail of the old building. The McKimmon crew is very responsive and is actively seeking our feedback. I am sure those problems will be eliminated by next year (but, as is normal with technology, who knows what new problems will arise).
– Wifi. This is the third year in a row that our friends from SignalShare provided wifi for us (I bet they are providing wifi for SuperBowl as I write this – they’ll read this later). It rocks! With 450 highly-connected people constantly uploading and downloading stuff, tweeting, blogging, etc., no building can support our conference with its native wifi.
It seems from the feedback forms that one or two people erroneously chose one of the NCSU or McKimmon wifis instead of the official “ScienceOnline2012” one, in which case they reported some slow-downs and hiccups. We’ll try to make sure to communicate this little detail repeatedly next year, so people know what to do. Despite getting a good deal on this from our neighborly crew, wifi is one of the biggest items in our budget – if your organization is interested in sponsoring wifi next year (with the banner with your name occasionally showing up at the bottom – just start scrolling and it disappears), let us know as soon as you can.
– Livestreaming and recording. This is by far the most expensive item on our list and this year we just did not have the funds to do it. We tried until the very last day to find a sponsor (we had people lined up, ready to do it) but it did not materialize. In retrospect, we should have abandoned the idea earlier and focused more strongly on Plan B – providing a bunch of tripods and Flip cameras and asking our student-volunteers to record all the sessions and instantly upload them.
This way, we had to do it in a rush and rely on voluntary action of participants. We brought in a few Flips and issued a call for people to come and get them and to film sessions. Luckily, several people did, so many sessions are now online (just search YouTube for “scio12“). Hopefully a couple of generous sponsors will come in to fund this important service next year, or if the date is right we may explore a partnership with the Elon University school of journalism and hire their students to do this – livestreaming and recording are essential for including the virtual participants.
– Twitter and screens. We wanted to have a big screen with Twitterfall in the hallway, as well as to project the Art Contest entries on a larger screen, but this also fell by the wayside due to insufficient funds. Hopefully next year…
Twitter.com is actively blocking people from collecting tweets. A Twapperkeeper with about 11,000+ tweets generated before the conference is now gone, but I copied and pasted them all into an RTF document. There is roughly a day-long break during Tue-Wed of active tweeting where we have no collection I know of. There were apparently more than 17,000 tweets generated during the conference itself. And many more since then.
I have all of those tweets saved in my Gmail – I use tweetymail.com service which sends me notifications whenever the #scio12 hastag is used, usually sending it in batches of 20-100 tweets. That is still hundreds (perhaps thousands) of email notifications, but I have them and if I find a free hour or two I may also copy them into an RTF file – useless for Storifys, but if anyone has a use for them, let me know and I can compile and send. Finally, there are some collected subsets of tweets here, here and here that you may be able to use for Storifys, stats, etc.
– Babysitting. We want to make the conference family friendly. There were several kids (and even babies) at the conference – luckily we had LEGOs and plenty of fresh fruit. Unfortunately, we cannot legally organize or hire babysitters and have the kids be taken care at McKimmon. The best we can do is provide information in advance, e.g., names and recommendations for local babysitters or services, and let the parents make their own arrangements. We will also look into options for science-themed kids programing off-campus, since we are not allowed to make any such arrangements on campus.
– Cafe room. Big hit of the conference. Kudos to Karyn for her creative vision in organizing this space. LEGOs, coffee, food, tables for laptops, comfy chairs for chatting, power strips, books, art, bones, armpit swabs, more coffee, and the man behind the curtain! Definitely the center of activity for the entire conference, a place for serendipitous encounter and fun conversations.
– Swag. Most people are very happy with our decision to reduce the swag from an enormous bag of stuff to a nifty little notebook filled with stickers and temporary tattoos. The book lottery was a huge hit as well. So was the ThinkGeek swag served for the banquet dinner. But we were floored as to how many people mentioned in their feedback forms how much they loved the automatic dispensers of M&Ms with the #scio12 and Mendeley logos. Note to self: repeat something like this next year.
Next year
Yes, we will do this again next year. We do not have the date yet. First we need to confirm that McKimmon will have us again, then see what is on their calendar. It will be at roughly the same time – second half of January or perhaps very early February. Different people have different dates for their first day of classes, or attend different conferences. Still, once February comes, the density of other conferences becomes so high, we are bound to conflict with many of them. But let us know about the big ones that our attendees are likely to attend in large numbers, e.g., TAM or SICB.
At this point, there are 209 names on the waitlist. We did not “clean it up” as we went, so a couple of dozen of those people actually registered and attended, but that is still a large number. The mention and link in the New York Times article earlier in the week sent a flurry of new applicants to the waitlist, some as late as Saturday afternoon when the conference was already wrapping up. I guess people know that getting on the waitlist also automatically means getting on our mailing list, so they can get alerts in advance for the next year.
So, what do we do next? It seems that with 457 people we have reached the limit. Anything bigger than that and there is no way the intimate feel of the meeting can remain. Already a common theme on Twitter, after the conference ended, was people lamenting missing meeting some of the others.
In his post, Ed Yong stresses that we “rig things so that the most passionate people show up”. But that is only half of the picture – as I explained a couple of weeks ago, the excitable and tuned-in folks are essential but not sufficient for the success of the conference. Yes, they help shape the program throughout the year, they hit the ground running on Day One, they know how to do the ‘unconference’ method of leading sessions, they are more than welcoming to the newbies, but without newbies there would be no ScienceOnline. They refresh us every year. They bring in new ideas. They connect us to different communities back home once they leave.
They may be exactly the kind of people we want – non-blogging scientists, “bad” journalists, high school students, senior citizens with decades of media experience under their belts, as well as representatives of different groups, cultures or subcultures that can inject new ways of thinking into our community. They may belong to groups that are traditionally not welcome at the table so they may be reluctant to push their way in by being super-fast during registration times, but rather need to be invited, with a genuine welcome they can trust.
So we actually “rig things” so we get a little bit of both – as you could see this year: half veterans, half new people, more than half women, less than half bloggers or journalists, a quarter locals, many representatives of different scientific, geographic, professional or ethnic communities. The excitable veterans may fill first 100 slots within two minutes, but there are ways to bring in others as well – as moderators of sessions, as volunteers, as scholarship recipients, as Keynote speakers or Blitz-talk presenters. As the conference grows, and more and more people really, truly want to be here, this task becomes more difficult. We welcome other ideas that can help this happen.
As I also explained a couple of weeks ago, we do not want to change our funding methods. We don’t want to accept a large sponsorship from a large company that can then turn around and start shaping the program, e.g., insisting their CEO gives the Keynote lecture, or veto-ing a session. And we don’t want to substantially increase the registration fee because it is important to us to provide few barriers to people who cannot really afford to come here – we’d rather help them by waiving the fee and providing travel grants.
But this does not scale well. The registration fee does not pay for the participant. For $150 (or $75 if you are student), you get 6-7 complete meals, three whole days of coffee and snacks, rocking wifi, free transportation, entertainment, swag, books, personalized M&Ms, the Keynote speaker, use of equipment, and a good feeling that your fee or personal donation went toward travel grants for students, people without steady jobs, or people traveling from other continents. All of that needs to be sponsored and we prefer to have many small sponsors, each paying for one element of the event, rather than one or two huge sponsors who cover everything. Thus, we have to work hard to use every single dollar in the best possible way, often pondering late at night what would be the best use of the limited funds we have. We are pondering alternative methods of funding as well – from crowdfunding to setting up a swag store – and are interested in your thoughts.
According to Jeff Jarvis and his commenters, at this point, a popular conference can go in two ways: it can keep growing, like SXSW, and become more corporate and less of a community event; or it can limit the growth, like TED, and become exclusive, expensive and elitist. We don’t want to go either way.
It is likely, if the trend continues, that next year we’ll have more people stuck (and unhappy) on the waitlist than people registered. Thus, doing much more to include virtual participants is essential. We are also working on releasing some of that pressure by organizing additional events, either by ourselves, or in partnership with other organizations like Nature Publishing Group, or releasing our brand name to other groups to organize on their own. Sorta like TEDx events soften the exclusivity of the original TED, or the way 140conf has branched out to different cities and topics.
There are three potential models for this. One is an annual large event in other cities, like Science Online London. Another is a smaller monthly event with a single evening session, modeled after Science Online NYC. The third is a completely informal gather-and-drink monthly event, like #NYCSciTweetUp (now already copied in Washington DC and in Chicago, with Raleigh and Seattle doing some thinking about doing the same). We are exploring all of these options with potential partners for San Francisco this year, and potentially Austin, Chicago, Vancouver, Belgrade and Antananarivo in the future. Also, a topical Science Online Teen (#sciojr) is being planned for New York City in 2013. Events that occur entirely online are not out of the question, either.
Call to action
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to get ScienceOnline to slowly move from just talking to also doing. This year we did it – I think quite successfully – with art, photography, music, podcasting and video, as I already described above in the “bridging the cultures” subheading. In each of these areas we had workshops where people learned new skills, sessions where people discussed the applications of these skills, and events or opportunities to practice those skills on the spot.
Next year we want to do more. This year moderators got a gentle nudge to try to have goals, hopefully actionable goals, for their sessions. Next year, we’ll work in advance to make sure that some such actions materialize. There is already a discussion about a Hackaton on the 2013 wiki, with potentially multiple activities – some involving coding, some involving online activity not requiring coding skills, and some involving offline activity (yes, this year we had LEGO blocks for practice, but no clear goal as to what to do with them).
We are also interested in heeding Dave Wescott’s call for preparing action in countering politically motivated anti-science movements, both those coming from the Right (GW denialism, creationism, ban on stem cell research, etc.) and those coming from the Left (animal rights terrorism, anti-vaccination movement, New Age woo, anti-GMO-foods, etc.) – the two may require different strategies. Suggestions as to how to do this right are welcome – or just add ideas to the wiki.
Citizen Science projects are especially of interest to us. Last year, a number of participants got their navels swabbed, and the bacteria from them subsequently cultured. This year, the people from Rob Dunn’s lab were back, taking samples from the armpits. I am afraid to ask which orifice they intend to sample next year…and we hope we can do some other stuff as well.
Inspiration
We really like the way ScienceOnline inspires people to do more, or to start new projects with people they just met, or dig into information they first heard at the conference and write about it in greater depth later.
In the years past, many such projects had their first seeds at our meeting, and often were officially announced at the same meeting a year after. For example, ScienceSeeker was unveiled at last year’s conference, while some nifty upgrades were announced during this one.
This year, I understand that the session on using music and geometry to craft longform pieces will soon result in a webinar of sorts. Rachel Nuwer was inspired by the Lemur tour to dig deeper. Robin Lloyd and Matt Shipman were impressed by the Forensic Anthropology tour (as well as the table of bones the lab brought to McKimmon Center). Helen Chappel, Elizabeth Preston, Anna Kuchment and Brian Switek heard or saw something new and quirky at the two (Raleigh and Durham) Museum tours and wrote pieces with more details.
That’s the spirit!
See the current listing of blog and media coverage of #scio12 (and add any missing links if you know of them, please). If anything else comes out of the meeting, please let us know. And see you online, for the online year-long #scio13 until we meet again in person next January.
For many years people who attend conferences – including scientific conferences – noticed something interesting: the best discussions were those that occurred outside of lecture halls. Conversations that happened in the hallways, at the hotel bar, on a bus going to see a local attraction, or, if you are lucky with the location, on the beach, were informative, exciting and useful. This is where real information got exchanged, where younger members learned the “lore” and “tacit knowledge” from their elders in the field, where people started real connections, even friendships, where plans got hatched to start new collaborative projects, and more.
Experienced conference-goers can rarely be found in the actual conference rooms, or, if that would sometimes happen, they could be seen dozing off in the back row, or amusing themselves with the technology of the day (doodling on their notepad, later laptops, later iPhones/iPads). The speakers would prepare slideshows, the student presenters would all dress up and then sweat, the organizers would do their best to promote the sessions, only to see the rooms half-empty because everyone is having much more productive conversations out in the hallway.
So, some smart people a few years back decide to do something about this. Why not scratch most or all of the boring lecturing from the program, and instead move the hallway discussions into the conference rooms? Thus, the Unconference format was born. There are several different methods to organizing and participating in an Unconference (I provided some “Related” links at the bottom if you want to learn more, especially if you intend to organize an unconference yourself), but here I want to focus on the format we use at ScienceOnline conferences. While this post is public for everyone to read and think about and perhaps implement some of it in the future, the real target audience for this post are the participants (and even more: session moderators) of ScienceOnline2012, especially as more than half of the attendees this year are first-timers and may not be familiar with the format.
Building the Program
Some Unconferences build the program after the meeting starts, once everyone is in the room, using markers and a white-board over about an hour to put together a program. This can work wonderfully for a one-off local tech conference, but it has some serious drawbacks when organizing a large, international annual meeting with a particular topic. For example, this method privileges aggressive, A-type, middle-aged, white males over all the others who may not want to be so quick dashing to the board and grabbing the markers. Some topics may not be appropriate (for ScienceOnline each topic has to have a science component and an online component, not just one of the two).
Year after year the same topics would be rehashed over and over again – an annual conference needs some work to make each year new and fresh and creative and cutting-edge (and balanced – not everything should be about blogging or journalism as there are many other topics), one year’s topics are building on top of the topics already covered previously, making sure that there is interesting stuff both for the veterans and for the newcomers. Some people are paying a lot of money out of their own pockets to travel large distances, including from other continents – we cannot leave to chance the quality of the program, so this has to be done in advance.
But this does not mean that we invent the program out of our own heads. Instead, we just funnel the energy of the community. The program is crowdsourced and community-built. We put up the Program Suggestions page on the wiki early on (in March, I believe) and let the people edit the page and add their suggestions, start talking to each other and plotting (many of those ideas were first hatched on Twitter before getting added to the wiki – this shows the importance of following the #scio12 hashtag throughout the year – there are more than 10,000 tweets using this hashtag already, and the meeting is yet to start in two weeks).
In August and September we started contacting some of the people who posted interesting suggestions and helped them develop their ideas and build really interesting sessions. By October or so, this produced a rough draft of the program. By November, the final Program was set in stone. Now everyone can start preparing in advance for the sessions – it is very important to come prepared, as the quality of the discussion is dependent on the sum of the knowledge and wisdom of the people in the room (very important link to a post to read carefully), for which preparation in advance is an important factor.
Moderators of all the sessions are encouraged to start their own individual wiki pages where they can add more information, links, documents, ask questions, start the discussion in advance. Several have already done so (see examples here, here, here, here, here and here – there should be more soon). Once more of those single-session pages are built, we will also link to them from this nifty and useful Sched.org Agenda which you can use to personalize your own schedule (watch this video to get the most out of it).
Sessions – how to moderate, how to participate
There are three types of sessions this year. First, there are Blitz-talks on Friday afternoon (color-coded right now as light blue on the Agenda, but the color may change). These are fast 15-minute presentations done in a more traditional style, hoping that the discussions will commence afterwards in the hallways (and oh yeah, some of them WILL!).
Then, there are several workshop-style sessions (provisionally lavender-ish color on the Sched.org Agenda) where the people in front have skills that the people in the room are trying to learn. Just because this is more of a classroom-type situation does not mean that the session cannot be lively and interactive, as other people in the room are encouraged to ask questions and inject their own knowledge from the beginning. At previous iterations of the meeting, that is exactly what happened in each workshop.
But the majority of sessions (right now coded with banana-yellow on the Agenda, though this may change) are meant to be in a truly unconference mode: the people in front are not speakers or lecturers, they are moderators. Use of PowerPoint is strongly discouraged – if something needs to be shown, it usually can be quickly found and shown on the Web. Moderators will start the session with a brief introduction to the topic and the goals of the session, and will be ready to instantly respond to the questions and comments from the room. Their job is to make sure that the discussion goes smoothly, that it stays on topic, that no individual (including themselves) hijacks the conversation, and, in the best of all worlds, to end the session either with a resolution, an answer to a question, or with something actionable that the people in the room can commit to do or build over the following few weeks or months of collaborative work online. The session ends when people decide it’s over. Yes, the session physically ends when the time is up, but the discussion can spill into subsequent related sessions, or continue in the hallways and online as long as people want to continue – some topics go on in the blogosphere for many months after the session ends. Be prepared.
This year, for the first time (though we toyed with the idea before), we implemented three new rules which should help make the Program and the sessions more lively. First, we set a limit to two moderators per session. Tendency to build large panels (which allows more people to register as moderators, with a guaranteed slot) is not conducive to free-flowing discussion. By the time all the panelists have their say, half the allocated time is over and it is hard to get the discussion going. We’ve had a couple of panels in the past that were done well and were interactive, but those were done by organizational geniuses and we cannot be sure that can always happen. If moderators want the knowledge and wisdom of particular people to be tapped into during their session, they are encouraged to ask those people to register, come to their session, sit in the room with everyone else, and be prepared to be productive contributors to the conversation.
Second, we set a limit to two sessions per moderator. This way we avoided the situation in which many sessions are led by the same usual suspects. Instead, many sessions are going to be moderated by new people, bringing in fresh perspectives and voices, thus rejuvenating the conference and making it more interesting and more fun. Due to this year’s growth-spurt of the meeting, more than half of the attendees will be first-timers, which should prevent the veterans from forming cliques and dominating the discourse.
Third, we discourage Skyping in people. First, Skype is a drain on the wifi (and that is expensive). Second, it stilts the discussion and has to be done with care and not everyone knows how to do it well. It is not 100% reliable it will work. And, although we may do it in an emergency (e.g., if a moderator gets stuck and cannot show up at the last moment), we did not want any session moderators to plan in advance on skyping in other people, or having virtual co-moderation (hard to moderate a discussion when one cannot see/hear/feel the room, anyway).
Oh, and it is perfectly OK to enter or leave the room in the middle of the session – if the discussion goes in the direction you are not interested in, don’t waste your time, but go to another session instead. It’s fine. No, really, it’s OK.
Virtual participation
As I noted before, ScienceOnline is a kind of conference that is ongoing online throughout the year, mainly on Twitter using the official hasthtag #scio12, as well as on blogs and other online platforms. Once a year, the physical interaction gets added to this. Both AntonZuiker and I find great value in meeting online friends in person. It raises the subsequent quality of online discourse to a higher level and allows magical things to happen – from personal friendships, to gigs and jobs, to business start-ups, to scientific collaborations and more. Meeting in person makes a community grow stronger.
But we are also aware that not everyone can come to the conference. There is limited space (about 450 people this year which is huge growth from 320 last year). Some people have to be elsewhere. Some people just live too far away. But they are part of this community, so they cannot and should not be cut off from the proceedings. The attendees themselves do most of the communication out of the conference, on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and more. Everyone is encouraged to relay as much as possible about the event to the online audiences in as real-time as humanely possible. Some sessions will probably be livestreamed and most or all sessions will be recorded in one way or another. And we will have volunteers whose task will be to produce blog posts, Storify-s of tweets, photography, podcasts and videos of the event. There will also be a variety of ways for people to post their artistic renderings of the meeting online as well (e.g., sketches, aka, livescribes of the sessions). And as many in the attendance are professional journalists, we expect, as in the past years, that MSM articles will appear soon afterward.
That is information going out. How about information coming in? There will be a Twitterfall in the hallway, but there will be none in the session rooms (for a good reason). With our attendees being so hooked online, with everyone livetweeting or liveblogging, essentially everyone in the room will be monitoring the outside twitterverse (and Facebook, G+, blogs etc) and will be ready to instantly reply. As long as people use the #scio12 hashtag, everyone in the room will be able to see their tweets, perhaps insert Twitter-posted questions into the live discussion in the room. That seemed to work the last couple of years, and should work again. Moreover, all the moderators will be instructed to pay attention to the online discussion themselves, as they have the power to move discussion in different direction in response to the online chatter.
Again this year, our friends at SignalShare will provide rocket-speed wifi at the venue. They usually do bigger events, like Super Bowl and Grammys, but from their perspective, although numerically smaller in regard to the number of people on site, we are a big event. Every year they are flabbergasted as to how much data this crowd can push through the intertubes in such a small period of time. This is a very connected crowd and people are constantly tweeting, blogging, uploading photos, podcasts and videos, and more. Not to mention livestreaming. No building has native wifi that can support this kind of crowd, but with the help of SignalShare, wifi will rock.
The ScienceOnline Community
ScienceOnline2012 is a community-organized, community-planned, community-funded, community-owned and community-run conference. The ethos of the meeting is that this is an egalitarian community. Nobody is VIP, nobody is a priori a superstar. One becomes a superstar by virtue of being here (including virtually, yes). Participating in ScienceOnline is a badge of honor and a matter of pride – it means “I am a part of the small but cutting-edge community that is changing the worlds of science and science communication”. Even those who tend to get treated as VIPs by other conferences – New York Times and The New Yorker columnists, senior scientists, Pulitzer Prize winners, familiar NPR voices, CEOs, top bloggers – love the fact that, once a year, they are equal to undergrads, high school students (and their teachers), beginner bloggers, programmers, artists, librarians, and others in the community. Everyone is a superstar in their own domain, and a n00b in others. Everyone has something to teach and something to learn. It is a lot of fun. A lot of networking goes on. A lot of intense learning goes on. Many, many collaborations and projects got started here, and those often turned into gigs and jobs later on. Some of those projects would then be first announced to the world at the next meeting.
This is one conference where personal finances do not (or at least should not, in theory) determine who can and who cannot come. This is what the community is for – to help each other. Those who can, donate their registration fees (and often more) towards the travel fund for those who cannot afford the trip. Students, freelancers, and others, come from all over the world – apart from people coming from all over the USA and Canada, we always have someone from the U.K., Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Serbia. We’ve had attendees in the past traveling from Brazil, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and this year we also expect people from Denmark, Australia and Mauritius. It is a global community, each helping the others come here if possible, perhaps being recipients of such help in the previous years as people’s fortunes change over time.
Every aspect of the conference is underwritten by small sponsorships from many, many organizations, big and small, preventing any one organization from starting to dominate and thus dictate the agenda. This model of funding is not only in line with the ethos of the conference but also the first step in putting together a new system of funding. Whenever old systems break and new ones are arising, many people in the new system do not have regular jobs because such jobs do not yet exist – they are in the process of inventing them. Others in the new system, the pioneers, make sure that all the others are well taken care of before they collectively build a new system that actually creates jobs for everyone within it. This is one of the things that ScienceOnline meeting is all about.
As the Program is built by the community on the wiki over several months, and as all the extra-curricularactivities, old and new, initially started as ideas from the community, everyone contributes ideas and realization of those ideas. This is why everyone feels it is their meeting. They feel an ownership of it. They do not come as guests, to see what we have prepared for them. Instead they come as hosts (even though they may live in Vancouver or Warsaw or Amsterdam or Sydney), ready to run this show. And the locals feel it doubly – for a couple of days each year, all the eyes are on the Triangle, for everyone to see what an amazing center of science, tech, and innovation this is.
Conversation
If the point of an Unconference is to take the hallway, tour-bus and hotel-bar discussions and move them into the conference rooms, then it makes sense to get the discussions started in the hallways first. To do that we have, in the past, dedicated the first day (or more) to the opportunities to mingle: Early-Bird dinner, workshops, tours, finally a Keynote, all of those happening before the official program started. This gave people plenty of time to arrive, rest, relax, get comfortable, start schmoozing and networking, serendipitously meeting other interesting people on the tour buses, etc. By the time the first session starts, the discussions have already been going on for some time, and it was easy to move them into conference rooms and continue – on a particular topic each hour.
One drawback to this kind of schedule is that not everyone would come to the first day of the meeting. Not having scheduled sessions felt to some like this was not an essential part of the conference (it is), so some people would arrive just in time for the main program (this included a lot of locals) at which point they can be confused and disoriented because they have missed all the informal discussions and socializing of the previous day.
The move to a new, bigger venue, as well as a great increase in the number of people attending in person, provided us with new challenges – how to let the meeting grow without losing the community spirit and the opportunities for serendipitous meetings, for networking and schmoozing. Also, how to make sure people understand that the informal events are an essential part of the meeting, not just the sessions?
We decided to try to expand the meeting to three full days (well, it always was three days, but it did not look like that on paper) and to have formal and informal aspects of the conference alternate – a little bit of sessions, then a little bit of something informal, then more sessions, more informal stuff, etc. This way, everyone will be here from the beginning to the end, and nobody will miss out on the important informal parts of the conference (one would have to actively leave in order to miss them, not just fail to show up). This also provides for continuous discussions going into and out of the session rooms for quite a while. Fortunately, it seems that many people are arriving on Wednesday afternoon (or even earlier) so the informal chatting can start early. We hope this works – fingers crossed.
On top of that, we (and when I say “we” I mean Karyn Traphagen, the Master of Ceremonies and an organizational genius) have planned on some creative use of space. McKimmon Center is large and was recently renovated (I remember when it was a deadly boring space – it is much more cozy and lively now). It has many interesting spaces and lots of nooks and crannies. Central to our conference – more central than any of the conference rooms – will be the large Cafe room. It will, apart from coffee flowing all day every day (and other drinks, water, cookies, candy and more), have all sorts of nice places to sit and chat in small groups, for individuals to sit down and use laptops, for others to see, touch, hear, explore stuff, leaf through books, watch attendee-produced art, monitor Twitterfall, and more (I myself do not know everything about this – I know Karyn will surprise us all with some of the things in there). This will be the Central-place foraging spot (from which people will go “foraging” to sessions and other events), the “activity hub” and the “home” for everyone. This is where you start and end your day, and where you come to take a break and meet people. I am looking forward to seeing you all in there.
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Today my guest is Kristi Holmes of VIVOweb.org (Twitter).
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Thank you for welcoming me, Bora!
It has been a bit of a journey to get to where I am now: a scientist completely immersed in the library environment. I was always incredibly interested in science – even from a very early age and spent many hours with my nose in a science book. In college, I had a great mentor who encouraged me to pursue advanced studies in chemistry, and I am grateful for his kindness and support (Thanks, Dr. Mosher!). I eventually graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry from Iowa State University where I worked on small ribosomal subunit assembly, learned how to think critically and had some fun along the way (Thanks, Dr. Culver!). Iowa State also gave me a great introduction to the library, as I served as the Graduate Student Senate representative to the University Library Committee. Upon graduation, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life – I knew that a traditional academic career wasn’t for me, as I find so many (too many?) topics of interest. I thought that intellectual property law might be a good fit, so my family and I moved to St. Louis so that I could go to law school. While in St. Louis, I stumbled into a career in the library, left behind law school, and I have been here ever since!
I have the good fortune to have a career that allows me to be able to bring my science background to a service-based library environment. I work as a bioinformaticist at the Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis. My job duties there are incredibly varied: I teach classes and coordinate training opportunities on campus on software platforms and databases, offer research consultations, support collaboration at our university, and I even work on projects related to research impact and genomic medicine.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I am fortunate to have an opportunity to work on a number of other exciting projects and I’ll describe a few of them for you. A great deal of my efforts in the library support the mission of the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (WU-ICTS). The WU-ICTS is one of 60 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions that “… are transforming the way biomedical research is conducted [by accelerating] the translation of laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, [engaging] communities in clinical research efforts, and [training] a new generation of clinical and translational researchers.” (CTSA Consortium, 2011) I am a member of the WU-ICTS and also serve as a member of the WU-ICTS Tracking & Evaluation program where we work to track research output and understand the impact of the Institute’s efforts. One particularly exciting project I’m involved with which is supported by the WU-ICTS and carried out in partnership with the Becker Medical Library and the Washington University Departments of Medicine, Genetics, Pediatrics and Pathology & Immunology is the interdisciplinary seminar series, Introduction to Genomic Medicine. The series offers attendees a practical background in topics related to genomic research and applications of genomic technologies in the research environment and aims to increase understanding of the clinical application of gained knowledge. The 2011 series was a resounding success and we look forward to the 2012 series.
I also serve as the National Outreach Coordinator for an open source Semantic Web-based research discovery platform called VIVO (www.vivoweb.org). VIVO facilitates research discovery by providing verifiable information about researchers and their interests, expertise, publications, grants, courses, and more. Across institutions, VIVO provides a uniform semantic structure to enable a new class of tools that use this data to advance science. I have been working in this role for about two years as part of a National Institutes of Health–funded ARRA award. This role necessitates that I am on the road a lot, visiting universities and organizations and attending conferences (like Science Online!). I conduct webinars for groups wishing to know more about the VIVO software and work on a number of policy- and data-related tasks, as well. We’ve had a national conference for two years now, with the third scheduled for August 22-24, 2012 in Miami, FL. We also sponsor other events such as workshops, an implementation fest, and hackathons. The open source VIVO community is vibrant and growing and it has been great fun to collaborate with amazing people from across the country and around the world.
Locally, our library is interested in how we can support our researchers in areas related to data management and preservation, dissemination, and so on. I’ve been working with a group of librarians from across both campuses at Washington University as part of the Association of Research Libraries/Digital Library Foundation (ARL/DLF) E-Science Institute. As part of this work, each team carries out an environmental scan of their university, conducts interviews with the major stakeholders, performs a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats) and eventually develops a game plan to support the needs of our research community around data. We’re in the middle of this process right now and I anxiously await the end so that we have a good perspective of how best to move forward at our university.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I find that I tend to be a “jack of all trades” at work. There are so many interesting projects and ideas flowing right now, I find it hard to restrict my time to just a few areas! Beyond my daily responsibilities supporting WU researchers, I have several other projects that occupy my time. Certainly my roles on the local and national VIVO projects are a major effort, as is my work on topics related to “e-research” topics at our institution. I am collaborating with the Scholarly Communications Specialist at Becker Library, Cathy Sarli, on updates to the Becker Model – a framework for moving beyond citation counts to track the impact of biomedical research. I have also been spending a great deal of time working to develop programs that educate and provide information support for a wide range of stakeholders on topics related to genomic medicine (e.g. researchers, various health care providers, patients and their advocates).
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
My work on VIVO has given me a good perspective of the limitations in the discovery process in the academic environment. Data are spread out, often out of date, and poorly structured and maintained. There is an increasing recognition by a variety of stakeholders of the value of semantic web standards and technologies to facilitate research discovery. I’m eager to share the opportunities that the Semantic Web presents for not only connecting people, but also for building a rich open web of information that can be used for a variety of purposes for everyone – researchers, journalists, patients, librarians, and physicians, alike. I’m also very excited about some of the recent efforts related to scholarly output and impact, such as microattribution, nanopublications, and various alternative metric efforts by a number of groups. A good discussion of many of these issues can be found in a recent article from Nature Genetics, The value of data. (Mons, 2011)
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have a couple of blogs and I use them primarily as a way to share information with readers. While I don’t often write long posts, I have found that the blog medium fits my needs. My library blog, Bioinformatics@Becker, serves as a place for me to share resources, advertise classes, and post interesting ideas that pop up. I also have a VIVO blog where I post project announcements and press releases.
As far as other social media goes, even though I feel as though I was a late adopter, I really value Twitter as a way to stay up to date in a variety of topic areas. The tweets are short, relevant, and contain extra information such as links to websites if I want to learn more about the topic. I also like Twitter because it allows me to virtually attend conferences by following a conference hash tag – a great way to stretch tight travel budgets.
My online activities allow me to be more productive than ever. I depend on blogs, wikis, and Twitter for information and I depend on other tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, and GoToMeeting to make online collaboration and communication easier.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
There are far too many good blogs to mention them all – especially this year with the increased attendance. I am definitely looking forward to chatting with some of my favorite bloggers (old and new!) at Science Online 2012.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
Science Online 2011 was a great opportunity to have a front-row seat to different aspects of science communication. There are so many interesting people doing very interesting work – what a great community! It was also wonderful to see many library-based folks at Science Online. Libraries tend to be on the bleeding edge of information and technology and I loved hearing about work in other organizations.
I’m really excited for Science Online 2012! I think that the preliminary program looks amazing – although I will certainly have a difficult time deciding which sessions to attend. I look forward to participating in sessions related to things I do at work related to the Semantic Web (VIVO) and Genomic Medicine – it will be fun to share some of my interests with the other attendees. There is an amazing session of three full tracks of Techno Blitz presentations planned for Friday afternoon on topics related to doing science, communicating science and issues related to credit, identity, and discoverability in science. Most of all, I look forward to seeing familiar faces and to finally meeting a lot of the people I follow on Twitter and through blogs. This is going to be the most amazing weekend to hear about all of the cool things that are happening in this great big beautiful online world!
Posted onNovember 28, 2011byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Books: ‘Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science’ by Michael Nielsen
We knew for quite some time that Michael Nielsen (blog, Twitter) was writing a book about the future of science. He said so on his blog a few times, and wrote some posts as early, preliminary thoughts on the topics he’d like to cover in it, back in 2008 and in 2009 (those two posts are especially worth re-visiting – still current and thought-provoking).
The book is now out, and I have read the galley proofs sent to me by the publisher early on (bloggers get lots of free books, with no strings attached – it is up to us to review positively, review negatively, or not review at all). I was just too busy to sit down and write the review until now…
For those of you who do not have the patience to read the whole review, but are interested in the way new technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way science is done, I can say – go now and buy yourself a copy of Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. It is excellent. Worth your investment in time and money.
It is almost easier to describe this book by stating what it is not…
It is not an utopian, hyper-optimistic manifesto for all things Open Science (though the tone is generally optimistic and positive).
It is not an encyclopedia listing thousands of Open Science projects that people have started over the years, so your favourites (including perhaps a project of your own) are unlikely to be mentioned there.
What it is, is a careful examination of the potential for new ways of producing new knowledge. Note that it is not titled “Reinventing Science” or “Reinventing Research” but “Reinventing Discovery”, a much broader concept than just science. It is about various ways in which groups of people, by finding each other online and working together (either cooperatively or competitively), can make new discoveries about the world.
What Michael Nielsen did was carefully choose just a few projects, each using different technology, each having a different goal, and each having a different method, and analyzed how and why they were successful. What small differences made these projects successful while many similar ones were failures? What aspects of the method were key to its success, what were the strengths and what were the weaknesses? Why are some methods better for some specific goals than other methods? Why were some – initially exciting and heavily touted – projects failures in the long run? What did they do wrong?
As you can see, that is quite a breadth of projects with some very different histories, and very different goals. What ties them together is the crowdsourcing element – how large groups of people can solve problems that a handful of experts cannot solve alone, either due to lack of brain power, or lack of computing power, or lack of time. Some of these projects require that the crowd consists of people with high level of expertise on the subject – after all, non-mathematicians could not be of much help in the Polymath Project, or non-coders for developing Linux. But for other projects, literally anyone can contribute – one only needs to have a source of electricity, online access, and an instrument (e.g., computer, or smartphone) to get online to participate. The former are highly informal networks of experts working on a problem, the latter are what we now call “citizen science” projects.
What is notably missing from the book are lengthy discourses about science communication. There is nothing about the way the Web is disrupting and changing science journalism (and actually very little about scientific publishing). Science blogging is covered in a single subheading about one page long (though pros and cons of the blogging software for discovery are carefully dissected in the discussion of the Polymath Project). There is almost nothing about the use of the Web in science education.
And this is fine – covering all of those topics would make the book twice as long and would dilute its message (if I was not so busy and so ADHD, I’d relent to the hounding publisher/agent who wants me to write a book about those other areas – perhaps one day I’ll say yes to that idea so Amazon.com can suggest that people who like my book should also buy Michael’s and vice versa). The book is about the way knowledge is made, not how it is disseminated once it is made – there is an unstated undertone that the open online activity of the discovery, especially when it involves thousands of non-experts, will inevitably result in the spread of the information, coupled with the excitement of watching – and sometimes participating in – the way the information is wrestled from Nature.
…How does one get answers to scientific questions, or get new technologies developed? By using the hive-mind. There are online boards and forums. You go there, offer virtual money, and the collective effort of the people on there provides you the answer in a timely fashion. It is so powerful that you can rely on the people to design you a new technology according to your specifications, and do it in time for you to go ahead with your plans, certain that the technology will be available to you at the time when you need it…
Just like in the fictional world of Vinge, the projected future world of Nielsen has in it a place for scientists trained in a traditional way, employed by traditional institutions, funded in traditional ways. After all, much of research is expensive, requires large investment in infrastructure and generally cannot be done at home in one’s garage. But, like Vinge, Nielsen imagines a world in which those scientists are not isolated from the rest of the world – they are dependent on the broad participation of many other people, with varying degrees of expertise: some collect data, some are good thinkers, some lend their computers to it, others provide a little extra funding for particular small projects. This is a vision of a world in which science is just one integral part of the general process of discovery of knowledge, which is one integral part of what the world normally does every day anyway.
But unlike pure speculative fiction, Nielsen’s ideas are built on a careful analysis of the past – from the anagrams of Galileo and Newton, to Henry Oldenburg and the invention of the scientific journal, to the invention of peer-review in mid-20th century, to the developments of the past couple of decades since the invention of the World Wide Web. It takes into account people and how they, being human, resist or accept new ways of doing old stuff. It points out the obstacles, and errors one can make in pushing for a more open and more collaborative research. But it also provides a blueprint for how to do it right. And this last thing is why YOU should buy this book and read it carefully – it gives you a cool-headed, calm, thoughtful analysis of the things that work. Use them.
There are many sessions (already noted in this series) that cover various aspects of science communication, but the sessions listed today are specifically about the way journalism is changing and how to adapt to this new world:
Going from blogging to MSM: selling out or gateway drug? (discussion) – Hannah Waters and Lucas Brouwers
The rise of science blogging has ushered in a new generation of writers who have more experience with blogging than with writing for traditional publications. And when said writers start writing for MSM, they face a distinct set of challenges — technical, managerial, and philosophical. This session intends to be part how–to, and part a wider discussion about transitioning from the blogger mindset to more traditional journalism. What do bloggers bring to the table, and how do you market those skills? What are some of the pitfalls they face? As you spend more time working on ‘official’ writing projects, what happens to the blog and how does the space change? How do you cope with having less control over the words and presentation of your writing? How do you deal with getting pushed out of your comfort zone of expertise? How do you reconcile the two approaches and leave work without feeling like you’ve sacrificed a part of your soul? We plan to feature testimony from editors dealing with writers fresh-from-the-wordpress to get a sense of the other side of the table. Neither of us have significant freelance experience, so we invite freelancers to add to the discussion.
Harassing the Powerful for Fun and Profit: An Informal Investigative Reporters’ Guide to Uncovering Secrets and Bypassing Flacks (discussion) – Charles Duhigg and Ivan Oransky
This workshop will explain how to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and non-FOIA methods to find information that people don’t want you to know, and how to pick topics and targets most likely to yield important insights. It will examine how to identify the officials and other sources most likely to provide assistance, and then how to get them to talk. It will explore how to investigate scientists and research efforts, and how to make use of the data you’ve received from government agencies. It won’t really explain how to make much of a profit. But, if your idea of a good time is ruining an arrogant bureaucrat’s day, you’re in the right place.
How do we teach science journalism in the era of social media? (discussion) – Paul Raeburn and Misha Angrist
For those of us trying to train next-gen science writers and bloggers, what do we teach them? Tools and tricks–and let them figure out how to use them? Intellectual examination of the history and nature of journalism, and let the students learn the tricks and tools on the job? Law schools teach deep academic content, and let employers teach the grads how to be lawyers. Journalism schools have traditionally taught writing and reporting skills. Medical schools are in the middle–study of science, and instruction in skills. Where should science journalism pedagogy be, with the media landscape changing as quickly as it is? To what breaches do we once more unto? If we insist on teaching John McPhee, are we fighting the last war? Or is now the moment to stand fast in defense of timeless storytelling?
Do press officers/public information officers need journalists any more? (duscussion) – David Harris
With the plethora of tools available to press officers/public information officers for direct-to-audience communication, how much is the intermediary of the mainstream press required? What kinds of formats and players are taking the place of mainstream press? How are press officers/PIOs using these tools effectively to both communicate messages and engage in substantive dialog with their stakeholders and audiences? The session is intended to not only assess where we are now but to futurecast the direction of this kind of work.
I can haz context? (discussion) – Ed Yong and Maggie Koerth-Baker
There’s a lot of talk about the need for more context in science journalism, to depict science as a fluid process rather than fixating on the latest paper-of-the-day. Vigorous nodding ensues. But how do we actually achieve this, how does this work for different media (print, blogs etc), what types of context are actually useful, how do journalists balance time and depth, how can we use the tools of the internet to provide context, and how can context in science writing actually help science itself?
Data Journalism: Talking the talk (hands-on workshop) – Ruth Spencer and Lena Groeger
We want this workshop to be first and foremost USEFUL to people, without requiring many in depth tutorials or technical explanations. One of the main hurdles on the adventure that is data journalism, is knowing just enough to be able to have a conversation with someone who can make your data dreams into data realities (read: programmers and developers). We’re less interested in perfecting your program skills and much more keen to get you familiar with the tools and processes you need to get your big project off the ground. We’ll explore how to get started and launch into a whirlwind tour through the (free!) resources for journalists looking to work with data. This will be less of a workshop and more of a crash course: What you need to know before you even know what you need to know (about data journalism).
Charting Your Own Course: How to Make It As a Freelancer (discussion) – Brian Switek and Hillary Rosner
Freelancing can be tough. Generating ideas, pitching stories, balancing projects, planning ahead to make sure the money keeps coming… How do full-time freelancers do it? What does it take to start science-writing without a safety net, especially during a time when paid work is increasingly elusive? Whether you’re a veteran freelancer or thinking about taking the plunge, bring your questions, tips, and tricks.
Writing about science for women’s (and men’s) magazines and not being ashamed of it, dammit (discussion) Maryn McKenna and Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn
The major women’s magazines — SELF, Health, More and others — reach audiences of more than 1 million per month in their paper versions and several million more on the web. Yet there’s science-writing community debate over whether we should write for them, to bring science to the masses (and also because they pay pretty well), or whether they are so compromised by simplification and error that writing for them is a scarlet letter of shame.
And on Saturday at 3:45-4:45pm, just before the end of the conference – the Plenary Panel: Check, check, 1, 2 . . . The sticky wicket of the scientist-journalist relationship, moderated by David Kroll, with panelists: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin and Bora Zivkovic.
Despite the reach of science blogs, science reporting from wide-circulation online or print publications continues to have the greatest impact on the public perception of science. The most essential but misunderstood component of science reporting is the relationship between the writer and the scientist source. While journalists and scientists may appear to have shared goals and expectations in story reporting, their distinctive motivations can lead to discord. This closing session will discuss three overlapping themes: 1) the perils of journalists growing too close with their sources, 2) the threat to objectivity in consulting scientist sources for fact-checking, and 3) for scientists, the drawbacks of engaging with the press on your science or that of others in your field. Each theme also carries significant advantages. How are the journalist and scientist best served while preserving the integrity of the science?
Much of science communication is not trying to be “objective” and present “both sides”, but rather is an attempt to educate, inform and persuade, sometimes working against the forces of pseudoscience and quackery. We have a series of sessions helping you navigate these waters.
You Got Your Politics in My Science (discussion) – John Timmer and Stephanie Zvan
Like it or not, anyone involved in communicating science will end up facing decisions about where the boundary lies between basic reporting and advocacy. Some scientific findings, like those surrounding the safety and efficacy of vaccination, call out for public education and political action. The U.S. government is the largest source of funding in many fields, which inextricably links science to policy decisions. And this year sees a U.S. presidential election in which there are stark differences in the acceptance of basic science between many candidates. Where is the boundary between informing about science–including its attendant politics–and advocating? When is advocacy appropriate? Is it even possible to avoid it? And how can staking out positions on issues unrelated to science (perhaps on Twitter or Facebook) influence how your professional work as a science communicator or scientist is perceived?
Networking Beyond the Academy (discussion) – Nancy Parmalee and Summer Ash
So you’ve been at the bench for a decade and now you’d like to branch out. Is your passport in order? Do you speak the language? What is the exchange rate for academic currency? A discussion of transferable skills, cultural and linguistic differences, and navigating a different world. Topics of interest: staying abreast of happenings outside of the academy, using your network to find opportunities, figuring out how to be great once you get there.
Covering Political Neuroscience in the Blogosphere (discussion) – Chris Mooney and Andrea Kuszewski
Recent research suggests that liberals and conservatives differ, in a measurable way, in brain structure and function. Yeah. Think about that. This work is far from phrenology, but interpreting its meaning is difficult and contentious. And indeed, given the massively controversial nature of this research, how can science bloggers contribute measure and sanity to the discussion of it? What caveats are necessary? What declarations are supportable? For it is not like this work is going away. Rather, we can expect more and more of these types of studies—of political phenotypes, of bio-politics—to emerge.
Citizens, experts, and science (discussion) – Amy Freitag and Janet Stemwedel
This session hopes to explore the “third wave of science” or “democratizing science” as we move beyond recognizing trained scientists as the sole source of authoritative, objective expertise. We will discuss some examples of how citizens can get involved in the scientific process – both in terms of where in the process (idea generation through analysis) and how (web access, in the field, etc.). Finally, we will cover what ethical questions must be addressed as this movement towards participatory science broadens.
– use of the web as a citizen science tool for data collection and beyond
– including citizens in the scientific process from idea generation to analysis and outreach
– ethics (who gets credit/authorship, where do you publish, etc.)
– Academic rewards for participating in participatory science
– conversations on blogs as early review
– who qualifies as an “expert” and what criteria do we use
Blogging Science While Female (discussion) – Christie Wilcox and Janet Stemwedel
The session on women in science blogging at Science Online 2011 sparked internet-wide discussion about sexism, discrimination and gender representation in science and science blogging. Now here we are, a year later. How have we, as a community, faced the issues brought up by last year’s discussion? What has changed? What have we learned, and what challenges still lie ahead? Moderators and attendees will assess the current state of women in the science blogosphere and discuss the best way we can support and encourage gender representation in science blogging.
Understanding audiences and how to know when you are *really* reaching out (discussion)- Kevin Zelnio and Emily Finke
Who is your audience? Do you write for anyone who will listen or do you target specific groups? How do you know you are reaching anyone? How do you address audience ignorance without making your audience feel ignorant? This session will explore taking a science communication pluralism approach to maximize the number of audiences we can reach. Some writers want to reach other scientists or professionals in their fields, some view their online activities as “broader impact” or outreach, while others write for publishing outlets and others write for whoever pays attention! Audiences are segregated by age class, geography, career, background knowledge and other random interests and often use widely different social networks for finding, aggregating an sharing content. How can we manage the balance of voice, scientific accuracy and tailoring content to appeal to a wider variety of audiences? How can we best communicate to different audiences without making anyone feel either ignorant or bored? Let’s discuss how science writers craft their content to cater to more than one audience, how they can address lack of basic background knowledge, how social networking is utilized and can be further harnessed and whether social media (and which types) make any difference in pimping your content out for a broader reach. What are the appropriate metrics to measure impact across a diverse array of audiences and more importantly what metrics do we need that are currently not available or accessible on freely available web stats software?
Broadening the Participation of Underrepresented Populations in Online Science Communication and Communities (discussion) – Danielle Lee
How are you using your skills in online communication to engage students and/or fellow scientists from underrepresented groups? How do you feel about the unusual digital divide: while texting is used more by underrepresented groups, does that compromise writing skills? How can non-minority allies cultivate and retain minority students into the sciences? Are credibility and authenticity necessary for mentoring minorities? Women scientist bloggers have been increasingly successful in creating a supportive online community that addresses their needs – what are the challenges for scientist-bloggers from underrepresented groups? More generally, and in the spirit of Dr. King, how has the web been used for nonviolent protesting and influencing culture?
Science Communication, Risk Communication, and the role of Social Networks (discussion) – David Ropeik
As important as it is for science communicators to provide clear, relevant, accurate information, people’s views about climate change or vaccines or genetically modified food or chemicals or nuclear power, or so many other health and safety issues, are a blend of conscious reasoning about the factual evidence, and subconscious emotional interpretation of that evidence. The subjective nature of risk perception, which shapes the choices people make as individuals and together as a society, raises unique challenges and ethical issues for science communicators. At a time of rising science denialism, as researchers in Italy face manslaughter charges for how they handled risk communication around the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, with the debate about climate change raging, this is a critically important issue. Topics to explore include: Why do people’s fears so often not match the evidence? What is the ethical obligation of science communication about risk? What is the latest research on risk perception? How can we integrate this research into science communication training? How does social media amplify or attenuate perceived risk?
Blogging to save the world: Conservation biology and social media (discussion) – David Shiffman and Neil Hammerschlag
Students, researchers, and staff from the University of Miami’s RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program will discuss how their lab uses social media tools to educate people about the marine environment and how they use these tools to encourage science-based conservation policies. The discussion will include using Twitter to teach ‘introduction to marine biology lectures’ online, webinars and other free online resources for educators, a ‘virtual expedition’, and more. Additionally, the speakers will share their personal experiences using social media to generate support for conservation-friendly policy changes using petitions, encouraging people to contact policymakers directly, and other techniques. We will also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of social media technology as it applies to conservation biology in general, as well as the future of these tools for this purpose.
Science writing in and for developing nations (discussion) – Grant Jacobs and Madhusudan Katti
To what extent might good science coverage improve the lot of the so-called ‘developing’ nations, what practical steps might help achieve this, what are the needs of science writers/journalists in those locations, etc. This topic may seem to clash with the demographics of those attending scio with most attendees coming from North America, the UK & Europe, but it’s topic that appeals to a wish to improve the lot of “developing” nations. It also appeals in that I’ve seen so little discussion of science writing/journalism in developing nations. I’m taking ‘developing nations’ very loosely here to allow for examples from nations that might be considered further developed than the poorest of the poor. In Western nations we rally against pseudoscience and poor reporting of science. For developing nations these issues run deeper. Would it be idealism to aspire to shift the mindsets of those in pivotal positions in those nations? Mindsets are, in many respects, the hardest thing to shift and practical initiatives can come to nothing if the will and want to use them isn’t there. Would these nations be helped by media there showing “heroes” in sound science and practical science-based applications? Is there a gap in who traditional media reach (think of low literacy in these nations) – would alternative communication be more effective? (Travelling seminars, perhaps?) What case examples might serve as prototypes? What organisations will, or might, support ventures like these?
Can Democracy Still Work in the Age of Science? (discussion) – Shawn Otto
Jefferson’s central idea of democracy is that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Jefferson thought it required “no very high degree” of education for people to be well-enough informed. But what happens in a world dominated by complex science? Are the people still well-enough informed to be trusted with their own government? Why or why not? Today, science is under political attack like never before. At the same time, science impacts almost every aspect of modern life, and is poised to create more knowledge in the next 40 years than in all of recorded history. Can we expect attacks to increase or lessen? Why is this happening? Why is it so much worse in the United States than the UK or EU? Why are people the world over protesting against both autocratic and democratic governments? Can democracy survive the rush of science? We’ll compare strategies scientists and journalists can use online and off to manage these emerging science challenges – together with a world of unsolved legacy environmental science challenges – for science and better public policy.
Several sessions this year focus on the strategies for scientists and the media how to talk to each other better:
Pimp your elevator pitch (workshop) – Karen James
For practising scientists: can you describe your research, clearly and accessibly, in two minutes? We plan to video about five volunteers doing their ‘elevator pitch’, then ask for feedback from the floor. Then the same five people do it again, and we compare the two (times five) videos. Hopefully this will be a worthwhile and engaging experiment for everybody who wants to engage with their family, the wider population, the departmental head, rich philanthropists…
Why Scientists Hate & Fear the Media; or, Science training for journalists. (discussion) – Miriam Goldstein and Craig McClain
During last year’s Death to Obfuscation workshop, tips & tricks came up for getting scientists to talk to journalists. But why do scientists have to be cajoled, lured, and begged to talk to journalists? And how can you as a journalist/writer avoid being a source of fear & loathing, and develop a positive relationship with scientists? Practicing scientists who’ve spent time in the communication trenches (Miriam on the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, Craig on “Isopocalypse”, and others in the room) will give the inside scoop about what scientists complain about behind closed doors, and how you as a journalist/writer can get beyond the apathy and hostility to amazing science stories.
Do press officers/public information officers need journalists any more (discussion) – David Harris
With the plethora of tools available to press officers/public information officers for direct-to-audience communication, how much is the intermediary of the mainstream press required? What kinds of formats and players are taking the place of mainstream press? How are press officers/PIOs using these tools effectively to both communicate messages and engage in substantive dialog with their stakeholders and audiences? The session is intended to not only assess where we are now but to futurecast the direction of this kind of work.
On the record – a media-skills workshop for scientists. (workshop) – Ed Yong and Charles Duhigg
This practical workshop will cover why media work is important, how to gain confidence, how to defend yourself against misquoting, and how to deal with interviews in a variety of media – phone, TV and radio; live and pre-recorded. It will be run by a massive raft of seasoned spokespeople and journalists. We will hope to give delegates practice by matching them up in pairs or small groups with journalists for mock interviews. The journalists may or may not be pretending to be evil.
What to do when you’re the go-to online outreach person at your institution: guidelines from the Science Online group (Working Group – commit to develop a written document) – Miriam Goldstein and Jai Ranganathan
When someone comes to you and says, “So I want to get into this internets things,” what do you tell them? Best practices? Lessons learned? This information is scattered over the blogosphere to some degree, so this working group will gather it up, incorporate new suggestions, and create a document for newcomers to online science communication. In addition to best practices, it would be useful to provide scientists with a “layman’s guide to social media” – what outlets are good for what kind of information, the most popular (and informative) tools, how to make your life easy in managing them all (programs like tweetdeck, linking posts, etc)
Next generation scientific society and conference – (discussion) – Scicurious and Donna Krupa
The most interesting scientific meetings for the participants are small, with lots of time for informal interactions and discussion of not-yet-published results. They sometimes happen in remote or unusual locations and are often funded by foundations or agencies rather than scientific societies. Such meetings have many drawbacks that go against the principles of open science — they encourage cliques, exclude many people who may be interested, and may fail to make a broad impact outside the participants. The documents that come out of such meetings, often edited volumes running hundreds of dollars, look good on a shelf but have little urgency or value. Journalists and the public may not even know that an interesting meeting is happening! This session will explore ways to create hybrid conferences, that combine the focus of a small meeting with a broader communication and publication strategy. The questions include: When is streaming media useful? How best to integrate remote participants? What kind of video product after the conference is most useful? How can a small meeting accomplish open access publication? What kind of advance timeline is necessary to catalyze the participants? How can such meetings be leveraged for outreach opportunities? Discussing how scientific societies and other scientific non-profits can work with science bloggers to increase the outreach potential of both. More organizations are becoming interested in recruiting bloggers, and many scientist bloggers are interested in blogging meetings related to their interests. We are interested in bringing the two together, and sharing our experiences as bloggers who blog meetings, and as organizers for societies that have worked with bloggers. How are bloggers different from mainstream reporters? Why should an organization work with one? How should organizations work with bloggers in terms of registration, setup, and facilitating their work? From the blogger’s end, what are organizations looking for in science bloggers, and what should we expect from the organization? What are best practices of blogging conferences? How do you approach an organization about blogging for one of their meetings?
Why the resistance to science blogging? (discussion) – Pascale Lane and Holly Bik
Many scientists and journal editors actively dismiss and denigrate all scientists who blog. They argue that bloggers are anonymous, untrustworthy, engage in ad hominem attacks, have no authority, and cannot (indeed, should not) be considered to be part of the scientific record. This session could examine ways to change the culture within peer-reviewed journals in particular that accepts – maybe even encourages! – the usefulness of blogging and other online discussion. How can bloggers change the attitude of journal editors, editorial boards, and reviewers? Can blogging, post-publication peer review, and other online activities be brought into the fold as part of the scientific record?
I wrote this post a long time ago – in December 24, 2008. At the time, Twitter was new, FriendFeed was small, Facebook did not yet have functionalities it has today, and Google Plus did not exist. So the main platform for finding an online community were blogs.
I found this (the link is now broken, but the site still exists, and I could not find the post – perhaps got lost to the vagaries of time, or a re-design of the site, or blogger’s whim) quite intriguing:
Those thinking that online social networking is a substitute for face-to-face interactions might want to think again. Recent research in psychology suggests there are some benefits to real-life socializing that the Internet just can’t provide; researchers at Stanford University have published a report in Psychological Science called “Synchrony and Cooperation” that indicates engaging in synchronous activities (e.g., marching, singing, dancing) strengthens social attachments and enables cooperation. As most of our online social networking to date is based on asynchronous communication and interaction, this could spell trouble for those that prefer to engage in relationships online rather than off.
Hmmm, isn’t this quite a leap? There is a difference between being in the same physical space and doing something rhythmic in it. There is also a difference between doing something together online vs. offline. I do not see how those things are comparable.
Scientists have theorized that synchronous activities lead to group cohesion ever since the 1970s, but Stanford’s Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath wanted to put some backing behind this notion. In one study, the researchers led 30 participants around campus in two different conditions: one walking in step (marching), the other walking normally. Afterwards, the participants were instructed to play an experimental economics game called the “Weak Link” in which productivity is a function of the lowest level of input. Wiltermuth and Heath found that participants that walked in step were initially more likely to cooperate as a team.
In a second study, participants were instructed to read or sing the Canadian National Anthem while performing a simple activity in tandem or separately. As you’d expect from the hypotheses, individuals that sang together or acted together showed a greater level of cooperation. A third study cemented these results.
OK, that’s fine. This is why people chant, sing, dance, march, etc. There are good reasons why simultaneous rhythmic activity fosters cooperation and closeness. Have you ever been to a political rally and chanted something in unison with thousands of others?
The game started a couple hours later as it was getting dark. It gets dark here at 4:30pm. And that was around the time the crowd began to cheer for their team. It was amazing to listen to. Imagine an entire stadium cheering together… but not the kind of cheering that we know in the States. This was not the sound of random cheers… or the periodic screams that come with doing the wave… and at no time did I ever heard the word “fence”. No, the Serbian fans were singing. They were all singing together to support their team. And their voices in unison echoed through the chilly night and into our apartment. It was astonishing. I truly believe that everyone should have the great privilege of listen to European soccer fans. Then again… I have no idea what they were singing… honestly, it could have been about a fence… but I’m not going to focus on that.
It does not matter if you are playing for Milan, Borussia, Real-Madrid or Manchester United – you have to be a professional, an amazingly self-controlled person with nerves of steel in order not to be affected by the continuous chant of 100,000 Red Star fans when playing at their stadium. The players play in sync with the audience chants, and the audience alters the chant to match the rhythm of the play. It is absolutely amazing to watch. So yes, rhythmic synchronized behavior is a great way to ensure group cohesion which is needed for attaining the group goals, e.g., of scoring goals. Or winning elections.
But now we get to the argument that does not seem to have anything to do with rhythmic behavior:
The Internet is a great enabler of asynchronicity. Instead of phone conversations or face-to-face chats, for instance, occurring in real time, instant messaging allows all parties involved to think and react at their own paces. E-mail is handled at the recipient’s leisure. The pace of social networking is dictated by the participants. Is the nature of online communication- that is, a lack of synchronicity- potentially damaging for relationships? If it takes a certain sort of tandem activity to strengthen social connections, maybe the Web is missing out big-time.
As an aside, this might also suggest why individuals that are deep into the gaming scene (e.g., MMORPGs, first person shooters, etc.) often tend to find companionship online more easily than most: perhaps playing a game online is a cooperatively kinesthetic experience that satisfies this human need for synchronicity.
Hmmm, none of this is rhythmmic activity. It is social, communal and synchronous, but it is not rhythmic. Thus, the study noted above can’t really say anything about it. A lot of the stuff online happens synchronously, in real time – Skype, chat, fast-moving discussions on blogs and forums, etc. are just as synchronous as a real-life conversation. Here, the distinction is not between rhythmic and arrhythmic, but between online and offline.
Now, a lot of online activity is centered around finding like-minded people. When you find them, and, let’s say you read their blogs regularly, after a while you start wishing to meet them in person. What do you do? You connect with them on Facebook or Dopplr.com in order to track each others travel so you can meet up whenever you are in the same town. You organize a Blogger MeetUp to meet like-minded people in your area, or a BloggerCon if you want to broaden the scope geographically. That is how ScienceOnline originated – my wish to meet other science bloggers in person.
But when we meet in person, do we engage in rhythmic behaviors (no, I don’t want to know about that kind!)? Perhaps we may raise a glass of beer or wine in a completely synchronous and rhythmic manner, but that is rare. It is not about rhythmicity, it is about physical proximity. Even most of the Flash Mob activities (see this list for examples) are rarely rhythmic – I found only one example that is synchronously rhythmic.
This is also related to my obsession with the Death Of The Office, i.e., with the world of telecommuting and coworking. Instead of having the people picked for you by others – going to the office – you pick your own friends and, whenever possible, meet them in person. You actively choose to live in the place where you can combine all your needs for a particular climate and culture, with the proximity to a substantial number of people you like to see often, although you have first discovered each other online.
Then you can go with them to a soccer match and chant in sync if you want, but that’s not the point.
Text, image, video…what about sounds? Sounds of human voice, sounds of nature, sounds of science in action, sounds of music…all of those have strong emotional impact on the listeners, but it takes some skill to make it work, to get listeners to pay attention and learn. We have lined up some amazing people to help us learn how to do exactly that:
Podcasting for Beginners (hands-on workshop) – Ginger Campbell and Alok Jha
Experienced podcasters Ginger Campbell (the Brain Science Podcast) and Alok Jha (Science Weekly) will lead this session for everyone who is interested in creating audio content with a focus on podcasting. This is a practical “nuts and bolts” session aimed at beginners, but it is also an opportunity for all podcasters to share questions, tips, and advice.
Science Podcasting: Pros and Cons (discussion) – Julia Galef and Desiree Schell
Desiree Schell (host of Skeptically Speaking) and Julia Galef (co-host of Rationally Speaking) both host successful podcasts that inform and entertain the science-loving public. They’ll lead a discussion on the creative ways that science communicators of all types can get their message out via podcast. Topics include: finding your voice, reaching your audience, involving bloggers and non-blogging scientists, and helping experts make the topics accessible and engaging to laypeople.
The Sound of Science (discussion) – Rose Eveleth
Science is most often communicated visually. We all remember the flow charts, there are beautiful field guide illustrations, and sometimes you just need a good diagram. But look over there in the corner, where poor little sound is sitting, just waiting for you to recognize its potential. This session would explain why, and how, you should use sound to explain science. We’d look at ways in which sound can enhance your story. Whether it’s the voice of the researcher, or just the sound that the stuff you’re talking about makes, there’s something to be said for hearing a story. And this doesn’t require Radiolab-style production (we can’t all be MacArthur geniuses after all). A simple sound, embedded into your story, can turn things up to 11. The session will explore what kinds of stories are worth “soundifying”, look at some good examples of sounds within stories, and talk about how to embed sound into your work in an easy, sensical way.
The Music of Science: An Effective Tool for Science Communication? (discussion) – Princess Ojiaku and Adrian J. Ebsary
A review of what’s currently happening in the music and science worlds and how it influences the public perception of science. From Symphony of Science to Bjork’s new album, Biophilia, in what way do people making science musical inspire themselves and others? We’ll present examples from scientists and science communicators who make educational music about science to musicians who use science as a vehicle for personal expression. We’ll take examples from the big names and the smaller names and analyze their reach and effectiveness. We’ll also discuss how to get involved in the conversation by presenting platforms for scientist-musician collaborations across distances.
The late-night Open Mike, a big hit last year as so many of our attendees are talented musicians, may still happen this time around – stay tuned.
From short educational videos to Hollywood blockbusters, movie is one of the most persuasive and important media that can influence what people know and how they think about science. Thus, we have prepared quite a line-up of sessions on this topic for this year:
Basic Video Making 101: An online tutorial (hands-on workshop) – Jim Hutchins and Joanne Manaster
This is a hands-on workshop where participants can begin to script and produce their own videos. Each video needs to tell a story. What are your objectives for the video you’re making? What do you hope to accomplish? Just as we have clearly defined objectives and a “hidden curriculum” in the classroom, video production needs a set of decisions about level of presentation, lighting, dress, and setting that will affect how your audience reacts to your video. We will also work together to develop “best practices”: what works, and what doesn’t work, in online videos? Come prepared with your ideas and we will work together to turn them into ready-to-post videos.
Filming and Communicating Your Research: The Power is Yours! (discussion) – Austin Gallagher and Carin Bondar
The combination of affordable portable video recording devices and streamlined, universal online video communication has paved the road for an emerging and exciting platform for science communication. We propose a discussion that brings together filmmakers, journalists, and scientists, to share experiences and success stories on how to use these technologies to one’s advantage. For example, we share stories from a recent real-time video virtual expedition conducted from on white shark research in South Africa (called the White Shark Manifesto), and the lessons we have learned through creating and leading film festivals such as the Beneath the Waves Film Festival, a unique film festival held within a scientific conference. The discussion will be led by Austin Gallagher and Christine Shepard: one is a scientist who dabbles heavily in film–the other a filmmaker who dabbles heavily science. We hope to share exciting video clips and stories from the field, while moderating a session for tips, advice, and discussion with question and answer.
So You Want To Make A Science Documentary (discussion) – Tom Levenson
This workshop is aimed at those who want to take the next step into storytelling with moving images or sound in work that moves past straight news, commentary or illustration into documentary. It will be half practical, focusing on production much more than technical crafts, which is to say it will talk about how to organize a documentary project down to a quite nitty-gritty level more than how to use a camera or which microphone to buy. (Though some of that kind of stuff will, no doubt, slip in.) The other half of the workshop will look at/listen to a couple of short, well made science documentaries, including recent student work, to start the discussion on what the particular challenges and opportunities for telling stories the media of audio or video create.
“It’s Good To Be The King” – Blogging the Mel Brooks Way! (discussion) – David Manly and @DrRubidium
How to get started, engage a audience, conduct blog research, establish collaborations, keep your writing fresh, appreciate your followers, effectively deal with detractors and many other blogging lessons can be gleaned from an unlikely source – Mel Brooks movies (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Producers, Space Balls, Robin Hood: Men in Tights…). We will present lessons learned through blogging and Brooks movies in this fun and informative session.
‘Cyberscreen Science Film Festival’ – hosted by Carin Bondar and Joanne Manaster. Last year, this was one of the break-out sessions. But it was such a great success, we decided to give it its own time-slot this time so everyone can see it. They will soon post more information about it on their blog.
As I mentioned before, ScienceOnline is a conference that explores the ways the Web changes the way science is communicated, taught and done. As always, there will be a nice track of sessions focusing on the “taught” part. Here they are:
Blogging in the undergraduate science classroom (how to maximize the potential of course blogs) (discussion) – Jason Goldman and John Hawks
This session will mainly feature a roundtable discussion of “best practices” for incorporating blogs into undergraduate courses. Possible topics that will be covered: Developing, evaluating, and grading assignments, incorporating blogs into syllabi, how blogging can contribute to learning goals, privacy versus openness, especially with respect to FERPA, and interacting with students with social media more broadly (e.g. twitter, G+, facebook, etc).
Undergraduate Education: Collaborating to Create the Next Generation of Open Scientists (discussion) – John Dupuis and Tanya Noel
There are two ideas here, centered around the kinds of things that faculty and librarians can work on together in undergraduate education. First: teaching undergrads about the scholarly information landscape. On the one hand, this is about making sure students can find the information they need for their school work, both formal sources like journals and informal sources like blogs. And this brings up the problem of how do we get them to think about what formal and informal really means? Students don’t just arrive at university with that knowledge built in. We might like to think they do, we might hope they do, and certainly the ones we like to hang around with at conferences already do. So, how do we — faculty, librarians and others — work together to teach students to navigate the disciplinary landscape and become productive and critical consumers of and contributors to their disciplinary conversation. Second: how do we teach students about the great big wide world of open science? How do all the various players in higher education make sure that the incredible depth and complexity of what going on out there is communicated to the next generation? How do we raise the next generation of Cameron Neylons, Steve Kochs and Jean-Claude Bradleys (not to mention the next generation of Dorothea Salos or Christina Pikases)? There’s a lot to cover here: blogs, blog networks, blog aggregators, open access, open data, open notebooks, citizen science, alt-metrics and all the rest.
Is encouraging scientific literacy more than telling people what they need to know? (discussion) – Marie-Claire Shanahan and Catherine Anderson
The idea of scientific literacy is a sometimes maligned idea, one that too often focuses on which scientific ideas the public doesn’t understand. But what happens when we think about it differently? What if scientific literacy is a fluid concept that lets us consider the skills and contextual understandings that people need to really engage with science, in the media and in their everyday lives? What does this kind of literacy mean for online science? This session will explore the scientific literacy skills and understandings that help people understand and engage with complex scientific controversies where simple scientific facts are not enough (such as the recent neutrino results). It will also ask how writers and bloggers can engage and encourage those skills and understandings in their reading community and how science education and outreach efforts can reflect this view of scientific literacy.
The Next Generation of Bloggers (discussion) – Stacy Baker and students
From classroom blogging, to blogging at Nature, these students had quite a year! They’d like to start by talking about their experience with blogging so far, what they’ve learned, where they’ve had problems, and where they’ve been successful. Then, they want to get ideas from the audience on how to start a 1 day conference in NYC for middle/high school students interested in blog
Students as Messengers of Science (discussion) – Gabrielle Lyon and Stephanie Levi
High school and undergraduate students have a unique place in engaging their communities through science, while becoming the next generation of scientists, science writers, and journalists. As an increasingly diverse pool of students engage their families in their pursuits through mentoring, research and other immersion programs, as well as writing and journalism, they lay the groundwork for making science accessible for the non-scientists in their lives, representing a range of diverse ethnic and socio-economic communities. How as educators and mentors do we nurture them as scientists and communicators? What skills and practices are key for helping young people reflect on learning while also developing effective communication skills? This session will foster a discussion of the barriers, challenges and best practices for creating the infrastructure, mentoring relationships, and building the confidence of students as they experience science to help them develop their voices. The session will also explore how we recruit readers of such sites, and will explore examples of online media connected with science engagement programs geared toward high school and undergraduate students that are creating a local culture of science, among traditionally underrepresented communities, with a local impact.
TechNyou – Building an online teaching community and developing critical thinking in students (demo) – Rob Thomas
Robert Thomas from the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research discusses the science education resource http://www.technyou.edu.au/education, an Australian Government initiative for high school science teachers. The resource provides materials in the fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and covers student learning objectives, including creative thinking and effective communication.
This year we are expanding our Health/Medicine track of sessions as well – from the usual one session to five! See:
The special perils–and pleasures–of medical blogging (discussion): Paul Raeburn and Maia Szalavitz
When Charlie Sheen spread his psyche across the web, Drew Pinsky and many others had no problem diagnosing him—a person they’d never met. The same thing happened with Jared Loughner–plenty of shrinks were happy to say what was wrong with him despite never having examined him, as were plenty of bloggers. Medical blogging is littered with traps that we can fall into—disease mongering, raising false hopes, violating patient privacy, and skirting around tricky ethical issues. At what point is it OK to discuss symptoms that could indicate mental disorder— and when does it do readers and affected people a disservice? When do efforts to destigmatize disease become advocacy and why do many affected people actually prefer medicalization to other labeling?
The basic science behind the medical research: where to find it, how and when to use it. (discussion) – Emily Willingham and Deborah Blum
Sometimes, a medical story makes no sense without the context of the basic science–the molecules, cells, and processes that led to the medical results. At other times, inclusion of the basic science can simply enhance the story. How can science writers, especially without specific training in science, find, understand, and explain that context? As important, when should they use it? The answers to the second question can depend on publishing context, intent, and word count. This session will involve moderators with experience incorporating basic science information into medically based pieces with their insights into the whens and whys of using it. The session will also include specific examples of what the moderators and audience have found works and doesn’t work from their own writing.
The Limits of Transparency: Self-Censorship in Physician Writers (discussion) – Judy Stone and Shara Yurkiewicz
This session is about more than HIPAA violations. Being a physician or a physician-in-training involves loyalties on a number of levels. We have moral obligations to ourselves, to our patients, to our colleagues, and to the community at large. Sometimes, what we want to say on behalf of one group conflicts with the interests of the others. When writing, we don’t get to choose our audience; the words are open to all. How can we say something meaningful that serves a community’s greater interest without compromising our professional loyalties or damaging our reputation among our medical peers? Or, how can we reflect upon the profession in a constructive way that doesn’t alienate the public or further erode the trust between patients and their doctors? Medicine is a tight-knit community where–like it or not–reputation matters and self-policing reigns supreme. Criticism is not always received well, even if it’s kept internal. If information is broadcast to those outside the profession, the author can be perceived as anything from less-than-serious to a liability to the profession’s image. (Neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks has been criticized as “a much better writer than he is a clinician” and “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”) There is currently only vague policy and precedent with regard to social media and blogging. “Use common sense” seems to be the theme, but, as we’ve increasingly witnessed, the boundaries of that “sense” vary widely among physician writers. What kind of balance can be struck to write substantially, professionally, and honestly?
Advocacy in medical blogging/communication–can you be an advocate and still be fair? (discussion) – Emily Willingham and Maia Szalavitz
There is already a session on how reporting facts on controversial topics can lead to accusations of advocacy. But what if you *are* an avowed advocate in a medical context, either as a person with a specific condition (autism, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease) or an ally? How can you, as a self-advocate or ally of an advocate, still retain credibility–and for what audience?
Genomic Medicine: From Bench to Bedside (discussion) – Kristi Holmes and Sandra Porter
This session will serve as an introduction to the topic of personalized medicine from the perspective of major stakeholders including: scientists, physicians, patients and their advocates, community groups and media professionals. We’ll begin with an introduction to the basic concepts and efforts in this area, followed by a discussion of information resources to serve stakeholder groups including relevant clinical, consumer health, and advocacy and policy resources. Various initiatives by government agencies, the commercial sector and academia will be discussed, including: Genetics Home Reference, 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and more.
ScienceOnline2012 is the conference that explores how the Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done.
While communicators, being quite communicative by nature, tend to communicate a lot about what they do at our meetings, do not forget the more quiet types, those who make new tools that make it easier for scientists to do their work – to gather and analyze data, network with each other, share data and information, and more. The pioneers of Open Source, Open Access and Open Data movements, the developers and promoters of new ways of doing science. This has been an important aspect of our conference from the very first one. And this year, there are more sessions, workshops and demos than ever – some really great stuff!
Interested in this? You still have a chance. There are 25 seats left, and those will be open for registration tonight at 6pm EST.
Dealing with Data (discussion) – Antony Williams and Kaitlin Thaney
On the importance of data publication, data management, and discovery in the sciences – from the tools that serve as enablers (ChemSpider, FigShare) to the broader issues affecting how we approach data-driven science and sharing of information (access, ownership, social stigma). This session will build upon Open Data sessions of the past, and look at how we can make better use of information to not only surface new insights, but do better science, as well as reward contributions in a way that reflects the move to digital.
Cybersecurity: Defense Against the Dark Arts (discussion) – Liz Neeley
Think about everything you have online. Blog posts, emails, personal information – the record of years of your life. How safe is it? How do you know if you are doing enough? Worrying too much? From basic password management to dealing with personal threats, this session will tackle questions of security and safety online. Come share your strategies and war stories, trade information on emerging trends, and help us combat hacks and attacks on the ScienceOnline community.
Open Notebook Science (discussion) – Jean-Claude Bradley and Steve Koch
We will discuss the semantic representation of Open Lab Notebooks and automated discovery by social mapping of ONS content. An example of merging ONS datasets with “Dark Open Science Contributors” – companies and government agencies that will donate large amounts of data to the public domain – if they are asked – will be presented. (e.g.Alfa Aesar and EPA donate Open Melting Point data ). We will also discuss the variety of electronic platforms for ONS and how to apply them in undergraduate science lab courses.
Know Your Digital Rights! (discussion) – Dave Mosher and Arikia Millikan
When you click “publish,” what rights have you gained, forfeited or abused? As more bloggers fall under the umbrella of mainstream media organizations, and traditional journalists increasingly navigate uncertain digital waters, all shades of contributors should know their legal safe zones — and good netiquette. In this session, we’ll cover the legalities and formalities of photo use, re-blogging, aggregating, excerpting, contracts and more, including some rare but dreaded missteps that may end in a lawsuit. We’ll present case studies and advice from legal pros and writers who have been through the ringer so that #Scio12 attendees might understand their rights and navigate future endeavors with more ease, better pay and peace of mind.
Using altmetrics tools to track the online impact of your research (discussion) – Euan Adie and Martin Fenner
We will briefly introduce the field of altmetrics, present the outcomes of an analysis performed especially for Science Online and then demo tools including ScienceCard , altmetric.com , and Total Impact . We will finish with a discussion of how these metrics might be used as alternatives and supplements to citation-based approaches.
Scientists and Wikipedia (discussion)- Greta Munger and Dario Taraborelli
The APS Wikipedia Initiative (APSWI) wants to ensure that the psychological science presented in Wikipedia is accurate and up to date. Instead of writing a literature review, my students (undergraduates) in a 200-level lecture course paired up to improve Wikipedia articles on various topics in cognitive psychology. Discussion topics could include: creating and managing the assignment; pros and cons of Wikipedia editing compared to traditional college paper writing; the value of engaging undergraduates in public scholarship as a form of civic engagement.
The Semantic Web (discussion) – Kristi Holmes and Antony Williams
Semantic Web-based projects are becoming increasingly more popular across a wide variety of disciplines. The session will provide a basic introduction to the topic and highlight different perspectives from people working in this space. We’ll show *why* this technology is being used in so many areas – and demonstrate the benefits of linked data (especially in areas related to data reuse for visualizations, research discovery, and more). Open PHACTS, VIVOproject, and a number of the open government initiatives are good examples and there are many others. This session can serve as an introduction to the concept and highlight interesting and different ways that this technology is being used successfully.
The Attention Economy: The currencies for social media influence and exchange rates for attention (workshop) – Adrian J. Ebsary and Lou Woodley
In this session we’ll look at the various tools that claim to measure user influence on across social networks and discuss some of the issues and etiquette around how you can increase your influence. Using screenshot walkthroughs, we will describe briefly the currently available influence metrics and look to analyze the values and shortfalls of each one. Also, we’ll examine some recent studies that look at network growth on Twitter and aim to start a discussion on the etiquette aspects of social media influence. What role do reciprocity (e.g. #followback) and attentional rewards (e.g. listing, favouriting, public shout-outs such as awarding K+ or #ff) play in personal network development? Are there other “soft” ways to increase your influence?
Digital Preservation and Science Online (discussion) – Trevor Owens and Bonnie Swoger
Preserving Science Online? What should we be keeping for posterity? Science is now a largely digital affair. A lot of resources are being invested in ensuring that scientific datasets and digital incarnations of traditional scholarly journals will be around for the future. However, little effort has been spent on the preservation of new modes of science communication; like blogging and podcasting, or on things like citizen science projects. After a brief introduction to digital preservation, this session will serve to brainstorm and identify critical at-risk digital content and articulate why that content is important. Time permitting, we will kick around ideas for how we might go about putting partnerships together to collect and preserve this content. Come prepared to discuss what science is happening online that you think is important and why? How should we go about selecting what to preserve? Lastly, who should go about ensuring long term access to this content?
Data Journalism: Talking the talk (hands-on workshop) – Ruth Spencer and Lena Groeger
We want this workshop to be first and foremost USEFUL to people, without requiring many in depth tutorials or technical explanations. One of the main hurdles on the adventure that is data journalism, is knowing just enough to be able to have a conversation with someone who can make your data dreams into data realities (read: programmers and developers). We’re less interested in perfecting your program skills and much more keen to get you familiar with the tools and processes you need to get your big project off the ground. We’ll explore how to get started and launch into a whirlwind tour through the (free!) resources for journalists looking to work with data. This will be less of a workshop and more of a crash course: What you need to know before you even know what you need to know (about data journalism).
Drowning in Information! How Can We Create Organization & Balance – Tools and strategies for managing information overload (science and otherwise) (discussion) – Walter Jessen and Simon Franz
We’re all suffering from the same condition: information overload and filter failure. Yet some people seem to manage the torrent of information more efficiently and effortlessly than others. What’s their secret? We’ll take a tour of some of the tools available to manage the mass of science-related content — from RSS to reference managers, and from collaboration docs to social aggregation. We’ll also reveal the daily reading habits of some of the best-known purveyors of science content, and come armed with your own tips for battling info overload too.
Using crowdfunding to fund your scientific research: lessons from the #SciFund Challenge (discussion) – Jai Ranganathan and Liz Neeley
Crowdfunding is a fundraising tool that has exploded in popularity recently, especially in the arts. Unfortunately, this revolution has left science mostly behind. The #SciFund Challenge is a campaign to encourage a large number of scientists to use crowdfunding to fund their scientific research. As part of the Challenge, participants will be running their own crowdfunding campaigns in November 2011. Due to the large number of independent campaigns that will be simultaneously running in November, there will be a huge opportunity for learning which techniques work (and don’t work) for crowdfunding for research dollars. This session will focus on lessons learned in the #SciFund Challenge for successful scientific fundraising through crowdfunding.
FigShare – ‘Get credit for all of your research’ (demo) – Mark Hahnel
FigShare is a open data data project that allows researchers to publish their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. The data can come in the form of individual figures, datasets or video files and users are encouraged to share their negative data and unpublished results too. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible. This allows scientists to access and share the information from anywhere in the world with minimal friction. This demo will walk you through how to use the tool, and what’s planned for the future. Come see how FigShare has grown from a seed of an idea at #scio11 to a full fledged project supported by Digital Science. For more, visit http://FigShare.com
A new way to fundraise for science: the SciFund Challenge (demo) – Jai Ranganathan
Can scientists raise money for their research through crowdfunding? In November and December, 49 scientists took the leap in the SciFund
Challenge. Find out the lessons that were learned about how research can be funded in this new way.
Biomedical apps (demo) – Jennifer Williams
In this demo session I will explore apps from BioMed Central and other publishers that extend the information ecosystem. These apps will connect bioscience resources mentioned in journal articles to the actual databases and to training on their usage, and also help readers extract and extend their understanding more easily.
PaperCritic (demo) – Jason Priem (on behalf of Martin Bachwerk)
In a world where our lives are broadcast by Facebook and Twitter, our news consumption is dominated by blogs and our knowledge is defined by Wikipedia articles, science somehow remains 20 years behind in terms of communicating about its advances. PaperCritic aims to improve the situation by offering researchers a way of monitoring all types of feedback about their scientific work, as well as allowing everyone to easily review the work of others, in a fully open and transparent environment. The demo will give an overview of the site’s main functions as well as discuss some plans for the future. Feel welcome to visit http://www.papercritic.com in the meantime to check it out for yourself.
Measuring the Ocean Online (demo) – Rachel Weidinger
How does the ocean measure up in social media? For the first time, aggregate, issue-level benchmarking analysis will be available. A new team will present findings– including content analysis, keyword trends, and possibly sentiment and influencer analysis– from project underway to lay down a baseline on the state of ocean conservation conversations on the social web. The goal of the yet unnamed project is to help science-based ocean content providers reach wider audiences with greater impact. Though it’ll focus on ocean issues, the benchmarking pattern may be of use in related disciplines.
Article-Level Metrics (ALM) at PLoS (demo) – Jennifer Lin
TBD
Mapping, knowledge sharing, and citizen science on the web using CartoDB – Andrew Hill
CartoDB (http://www.cartodb.com) is an open source, geospatial database on the web that provides storage, simple APIs, and mapping. Using components of CartoDB, we have helped develop a variety of science tools on the web from citizen science projects like OldWeather (http://oldweather.org/) and NEEMO (http://neemo.zooniverse.org/), to knowledge sharing projects like Protected Planet (http://protectedplanet.net/), and science support tools like GeoCAT (http://rlat.kew.org/). Now we would like to share some of CartoDB capabilities as well as discuss some of the lessons we have learned building science tools on the web.
How do you get the right background to be blogs editor at Scientific American? For Bora Zivkovic it started with raising horses in Belgrade.
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Cristina Merrill went to last month’s #NYCscitweetup and wrote up a nice article about it for the International Business Times – see Tweetups Provide Haven for Science Lovers:
The NYCSci Tweetup was born out of ScienceOnline, an annual conference that takes place in January in North Carolina. Another chapter also exists in Washington, D.C.
“We had this great kind of synergy,” said Krystal D’Costa, a digital anthropologist, who was inspired by the North Carolina conference and started to organize the monthly Tweetups in New York City. New York has a diverse community of science enthusiasts who mostly know each other through online groups, she said. “How do we get them all offline?” she wondered.
The next #NYCscitweetup, the last one of the year, will be on December 1st at Peculier Pub. I’ll do my best to be there. If you can come, please indicate so on the Facebook event page so we can get a rough head count in advance. If you “Like” the official #NYCscitweetup Facebook page you will be able to see updates, e.g., whenever a new event is set up.
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Organization of ScienceOnline2012 is in full swing. Hotel information is coming soon – with a larger number of people this year, we need to secure two hotels and this takes some time and effort. Once we do, we’ll let you know in several spaces, including on this wiki page. If you are already registered, you can start organizing carpooling and room-sharing here.
Next two registration times will be on Tues, Nov 8th at 00:01 a.m. EST (yes, that is tonight at midnight) and on Wed, Nov 9th at 6 p.m. EST. As we already have over 300 registrants, and are capping at 450 maximum, these two openings we’ll let in fewer than 100 people each time – we are still calculating how many. You can see who has registered so far here.
With the bad economy, many of our moderators and attendees are hurting for money and asking for some financial help for travel. If your organization is interested in sponsoring some of them with travel grants, or if you’d like to sponsor the event in other ways, please let us know ASAP.
The main Program is online (though exact scheduling and room assignments are still to come), but there will be much more: lab and museum tours, banquet, stand-up comedy, art gallery, film festival, book reading, Keynote address, demos+TechExpo, citizen science projects, and more. Stay tuned.
The first blog posts are coming up as well – here, our old friend David Warlick, expert in the use of technology in education, describes why educators, teachers and students should try to attend: Upcoming North Carolina Science Conference:
There’s not much that’s better, for this confirmed and long-time nerd, than being in a room filled with scientists. Teachers and students should feel this thrill as well.
I first published this post on December 5, 2007. It was later edited and published in the Journal of Science Communication.
Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors – official conventions. The term “constrained” I used above has two meanings – one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and thus much more likely for everyone to go to. Different technological and societal constraints shape what and how is communicated at different times in history and in different places on Earth.
Technology – Most communication throughout history, including today, is oral communication, constrained by human language, cognitive capabilities and physical distance. Oral communication today, in contrast to early history, is more likely to include a larger number of people in the audience with whom the speaker is not personally acquainted. It may also include technologies for distance transmission of sound, e.g., telephone or podcasts. This is the most “natural” means of communication.
Smoke signals and tom-toms introduced new constraints to communication – the messages had to be codified, short and simple and much of verbal and non-verbal communication had to be eliminated. Invention of writing, on stone tablets, clay tablets and papyrus, and later on paper and in print, changed the constraints further, making some aspects of communication easier and others more difficult, leading to the development of universal rules and norms of written communication. Unlike oral communication, the written communication is unidirectional, from one to many, making feedback from the audience difficult or impossible. Thus, it is necessarily linear. Its permanence also requires greater care be taken about the form and content. Finally, physical constraints (i.e., the size of a book) impose a structure to written communication, e.g., breaking down the work into chapters, subheadings and paragraphs, placed in a particular order. Also, written communication introduces the concept of authorship (and readership) while oral communication is “owned” by all the participants in the conversation.
Society – What and how is communicated differs dramatically if the audience is small and familiar (e.g., one’s children or neighbors) or large and unfamiliar (speaking at a conference). Written communication is, by definition, aimed at a large and unfamiliar audience, which has an effect on form, style and content of communication. Local habits and traditions further determine the forms and styles of communication.
Conventions – Different types of communication within particular groups of people are often officially codified, often precisely defining the language, style and format. Legal and scientific literature are probably the most extreme examples of a very strict code imposed by official societies. Such strict formalization of communication was initially very useful, imposing order (positive meaning of “constraint”) to an otherwise chaotic and undependable mish-mash of communication forms, allowing all the members of the community to understand and trust each other. However, when such strict forms last for decades and centuries, they are often made out-dated by the passage of time, invention of new technologies and societal changes, thus making the negative meaning of ‘constraint’ more and more obvious.
Scientific Communication
Development of communication of science reflects the development of science itself. Communication of information about the facts about the world did not differ much from other forms of communication for most of history until science itself started distinguishing itself as a special type of human endeavor, different from philosophy and religion. The way science communication evolved parallels the changes in our thinking about the scientific method. At the time when trips to the countryside and armchair thinking were still regarded as science, much of communication was in the form of books. When the hypothetico-deductive aspect of the scientific method “won” as the scientific method, the fledgling scientific societies, led by the Royal Society in the UK and the Academy in France, designed the form and structure of the scientific paper – the form we still use today: title, author, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion and references.
Today, we understand that the hypothetico-deductive method is just one of several elements of the scientific method (see this) and that the standard format of the scientific paper is perfectly unsuitable for publication of findings reached through other methods.
Description of new species (extant or extinct) requires a monograph format, for which specialized journals exist that cater to this particular format. Ecological surveys are often straight-jacketed into the standard format, with addition of unwarranted mathematization – not all science requires numbers and statistics. Finally, science is getting more and more collaborative – single-author papers are becoming a rarity, while the papers boasting 10, 20, 50 or even 100 authors are becoming a norm, which challenges the way authorship in science is determined (see this and links within).
But what really made the limitations of the standard format obvious is the genomic revolution. Sequencing a genome is not hypothetico-deductive science – it is akin to an ecological survey: apply a technique and see what you get! Now that the excitement of publication of the first few genomes has receded, the existing journals are inadequate platforms for publication of new genomes. While sequencing is getting easier with time, it is still expensive and time-consuming. Yet, the techniques have been standardized and there is really not much to say in the introduction, materials and methods or discussion sections of a genome paper. All that is needed is a place to deposit the raw data as tools for future research in an easily-minable format that makes such future research easy. The data would be accompanied by the minimal additional information: which species (or individual) was sequenced, which standard method was used (and if it was modified), and who did the work. It is not, any more, an intellectually creative endeavor, as useful as it is for the progress of biology and medicine.
Science On The Web
When e-mail first became popular as a communication method, some people understood it as an extension of the written communication (letters) while others took it to be a new form of oral communication (telephone). Of course, it is both and more. Two people can rapidly exchange a large number of brief personal messages (as in a phone conversation), or one can send a long e-mail message to a large group of people, written with proper grammar, capitalization, punctuation and formatting (as a pamphlet). And yet, it is also neither – unlike oral communication, there is no way to convey non-verbal communication (thus the invention of emoticons 😉 ). Unlike written communication, it is fast, informal, not usually taken very seriously or read carefully, and is easy to delete. E-mail is now a communication form of its own.
The communication on the Web is, likewise, a whole new form. Again, some people see it as written communication (putting an article or book online in order to reach more readers and nothing more), while others see it as a more personal, oral communication that is written down (and such people, unlike the first group, love podcasts and videos which add the non-verbal components of communication to the text). The former prefer static web-pages with their ‘feel’ of permanence. The latter prefer Usenet, livejournals and blogs. The latter perceive the former as stodgy, authoritarian and boring. The former perceive the latter as wild, illiterate and untrustworthy. Again, they are both right and they are both wrong – it is a whole new way of communicating, fusing and meshing the two styles in sometimes unpredictable ways – it is a mix of written and oral communication that combines permanency and authority with immediacy, honesty and the ability for rapid many-to-many communication. The younger generation will use it naturally (though this does not mean that many senior citizens today did not grasp it already as well).
So, how will the constraints (both positive and negative) imposed by the new technology and new social norms alter the formality of the scientific communication, including the format of the scientific paper?
Online, the constraints of the paper and printing press will be gone. No more need for volumes, or issues, or page numbers, or, for that matter, for the formal scientific papers.
The standard format of the scientific paper will become just one of many (and probably not the dominant or most frequent) form of scientific communication. Different people have different talents and inclinations. One is analytic, another synthetic. One is creative, another a hard worker. One has great hands with the equipment or animals, while another is good with computers and statistics. One has a lot of space and money and a network of collaborators at a prestigious institution, another is stuck in a small office somewhere in the developing world with no research funds at all. And each can make a valid and useful contribution to science. How?
One will have a great idea and publish it online. The other will turn the idea into an experimental protocol that tests the idea and will publish it somewhere online. The next will make a video of the experimental method. The next person will go to the lab and actually follow the protocol and post raw data online. The next person will take the data an analyze it and post the results somewhere else online. The next person will graph and visualize the data for easier understanding. The next person will write an essay that interprets the findings and puts them into the broader context (e.g., what does it mean?). The next one will write a summary that combines several of those findings (a review). The next will place that entire research program into the historical or philosophical context. The next will translate it into normal language that lay-people can understand.
They are all co-authors of the work. Each used his/her own strengths, knowledge and talents to contribute to the work. Yet they did not publish together, simultaneously or in the same online space, though all the pieces link to each other and thus can be accessed from a single spot. That single spot is the Scientific Journal, a place that hosts all of the pieces and links them together (also see Vernor Vinge’s vision of the science of the future, combining laboratories at universities with online boards where ideas and results are rapidly exchanged).
In the future, journals will be online hosts for all styles of scientific contribution and ways to link them together (within and betwen journals) – from hypotheses and experimental methods, to data, analyses, graphs to syntheses and philosophical discussions. The peers will review each other in real time and assign each other portions of the available funding according to the community perceptions of the individual’s needs and qualities. Universities will be places for teaching/training the next generations of scientists and for housing the labs. The PhD will be needed for becoming a professor, but not for becoming a worthy and respected contributor to science – that evaluation will be up to peers.
This may sound like science fiction, but we are already living in it. Repositories (like arXiv and Nature Precedings), science blogs, OA journals, Open Notebook Science (what Rosie Redfield and Jean-Claude Bradley do, for instance) are already here. And there is no going back.
So, how do we prepare for this future? Word: slowly but smartly. Science has some very conservative elements (in a non-political sense of the term) that will resist change. They will denigrate online contributions unless they are peer-reviewed in a traditional sense and published in a reputable journal in the traditional format of a scientific paper. Some will retire and die out. Others can be reformed. But such reforming takes patience and careful hand-holding.
The division of scientists into two camps as to understanding of the Web is obvious in the commentary on PLoS ONE articles (which used to be my job to monitor closely). Some scientists, usually themselves bloggers, treat the commentary space as a virtual conference – a place where real-time oral communication is written down for the sake of historical record. Their comments are short, blunt and to the point. Others write long treatises with lists of references. Even if their conclusions are negative, they are very polite about it (and very sensitive when on the receiving end of criticism). The former regard the latter as dishonest and thin-skinned. The latter see the former as rude and untrustworthy (just like in journalism). In the future, the two styles will fuse – the conversation will speed up and the comments will get shorter, but will still retain the sense of mutual respect (i.e., unlike on political blogs, nobody will be called an ‘idiot’ routinely). It is important to educate the users that the commentary space on TOPAZ-based journals is not a place for op-eds, neither it is a blog, but a record of conversations that are likely to be happening in the hallways at conferences, at lab meetings and journal clubs, preserved for posterity for the edification of students, scientists and historians of the future.
PLoS ONE is a good example of the scientific journal of the future that I have in mind – the ONE place where all the data will be deposited. The commentary space and the Hubs are where all the really interesting stuff will be happening before and after publication of data: hypotheses, methods, videos, podcasts, blogs, debates, discussions, user-user peer-review, etc. The other PLoS Journals will be places, closely connected to ONE and the Hubs, of course, where works of special value will be highlighted – high-quality, media-worthy and large/complete pieces of work, plus editorials, news, etc. – the added value. They are a necessary link between the present (past?) and the future – the showcase of the quality that we can provide and thus hopefully change the minds of the more resistant members of the scientific community.
I decided to put together links to all the Q&As I did with the participants of the ScienceOnline conferences so far. Many people who came once try to keep coming back again and again, each year. And next year, I guess I can start doing some “repeats” as people’s lives and careers change quite a lot over a period of 3-4 years. I should have thought of doing this in 2007! And there will be (hopefully) more 2012 interviews posted soon.
Posted onOctober 28, 2011byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on #scio11 – Web 2.0, Public and Private Spaces in the Scientific Community, and Generational Divides in the Practice of Science
My Water’s On Fire Tonight is a video that went viral back in May. It is a production of Studio 20 students in the NYU school of journalism (Music by David Holmes and Andrew Bean, Vocals by David Holmes and Niel Bekker, Animation by Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker) in collaboration with ProPublica, as part of their Explainer project.
What I particularly like about this video is that it has two explaining “levels”. The video itself is sufficient enough to briefly inform and educate about the issue of fracking. But, if anyone wants to learn more (or has problems with some of the statements in the video due to ideological biases), one only needs to look at the lyrics which are posted on the Explainer site and linked at the YouTube video itself. The lyrics contain links to in-depth ProPublica articles that support each of the statements made in the video. A thorough reader can go from these and dig even deeper, looking at primary sources identified in the articles, and so on.
Here are the lyrics (with links) so you can see for yourself:
Fracking is a form of natural gas drilling
An alternative to oil cause the oil kept spilling
Bringing jobs to small towns so everybody’s willing
People turn on their lights and the drillers make a killing
Water goes into the pipe, the pipe into the ground
The pressure creates fissures 7,000 feet down
The cracks release the gas that powers your town
That well is fracked….. Yeah totally fracked
But there’s more in the water than just H2O
Toxic chemicals help to make the fluid flow
With names like benzene and formaldehyde
You better keep ‘em far away from the water supply
The drillers say the fissures are a mile below
The groundwater pumped into American homes
But don’t tell it to the residents of Sublette Wy-O
That water’s fracked…. We’re talking Benzene…
What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight
So it all goes back to 2005
Bush said gas drillers didn’t have to comply
with the Safe Drinking Water Act, before too long
It was “frack, baby, frack” until the break of dawn.
With the EPA out it was up to the states
But they didn’t have the money to investigate
Sick people couldn’t prove fracking was to blame
All the while water wells were going up in flames
Cause it’s hard to contain all the methane released
It can get into the air, it can get into the streams.
It’s a greenhouse gas, worse than CO2
Fracking done wrong could lead to climate change too
Now it’s not that drillers should never be fracking
But the current regulation is severely lacking
Reduce the toxins, contain the gas and wastewater
And the people won’t get sick and the planet won’t get hotter
What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight.
Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m very international by heritage and philosophical bent. I’ve lived in Japan, Kansas, California, and Nebraska and have moved 20 times so far, mostly before the age of 20. My family is mainly in Japan and the Midwest but we’re an eclectic bunch and you can probably find someone I’m related to in most large countries. I was raised in a family which took the phrase liberal arts very seriously; I think all of us have our own mix of artistic and academic interests. To my knowledge I am the only one who holds degrees in all four areas: the arts (performing), sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with minors in Music and History from the University of Redlands, followed by a Master of Science in Library and Information Science at Drexel University.
I left Redlands aspiring to be a PhD candidate in Chemistry and realized two weeks into the degree that 3.5 years of constant research and classes equaled a very burnt out Kiyomi who had no interest whatsoever in taking more classes at that time. On the flip side I loved teaching general chemistry lab and was fortunate to be kept on as an adjunct professor for the remainder of the school year. Seeking more steady employment a faculty member referred me to an environmental testing laboratory having heard that I’d specialized in spectroscopy as an undergraduate.
I was hired as a GC Specialist Chemist (a rather ostentatious title required by the state) and later promoted to quality control manager. When you test the wastewater and drinking water for the area where you and your family live you tend to take your job very seriously. Working in the environmental testing industry you quickly learn that a lot of politics are involved in which laws are enforced and there’s always someone who thinks they can throw money or threaten you into giving them the results that they want. You really love and support those businesses that practice consistent and ethical water treatment and testing practices. Eventually I decided it was time to do something else.
After lengthy consideration I decided librarianship was the way to go, I could still play with spreadsheets and datasets, I could interact with people, and most importantly my job would involve me wearing a variety of different hats and keeping up with multiple areas of science and technology. Being able to spend holiday’s with friends and family instead of called into work was the icing on the cake. I quit my job, went back to school full-time for 14.5 months, aggressively learned about librarianship and marketed myself as a potential science librarian, and had an offer in hand within 16 month of quitting my previous job.
Currently, I am the librarian for Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physics & Astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln University Libraries (try saying that one three times fast!). I serve on the University’s Judicial Board, the Libraries’ Data Curation Committee, and several professional association committees. On any given day I may be assessing electronic resources, lobbying vendors, providing instruction, tutoring in the Chemistry Resource Center, attending science and library conferences, purchasing materials, preparing a presentation, performing research, applying for grants, etc.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Recently I spent a large amount of time working on my second year reappointment folders (yes, librarians can be tenure track too!) Now that those are in I’m hoping to focus on writing up two research projects which are complete and in need of analysis. The project closest to my heart is my study examining how individuals working in libraries with visible and non-visible medical conditions are treated in the work place. I was inspired to examine this issue based on my cousin’s experience completing a college degree, starting, and running a successful business, while being chronically ill. Although my cousin eventually died from his condition it did not hold him back from pursuing his dreams of running his own Eco Friendly construction business. Even in this bad economy he was turning jobs away.
For the purposes of this study I decided to examine Academic, Special, and Public libraries. In the future I’d like to collaborate with other scientists to examine this issue in science. I suspect that we may be losing some of our brightest stars because of the rigidity of our educational system, and because many people do not know their rights to accommodation. When people think about accommodating those with medical conditions there seems to be a feeling that all accommodations must be really onerous, whereas many people may only need a slight accommodation such as a first floor office to avoid stairs or a nightshift to avoid daylight. Some individuals may need to take a smaller number of classes to accommodate their health, but if they can pass the classes and do the research I believe that they deserve the degree. I’ve heard people argue that if a student can’t do the work in the same conditions as everyone else how will they obtain a job, but to me that is presumptuous and assumes that what the student wants to do with their degree follows a strict path.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I love how many science blogs are out there, seeing what interests scientists across disciplines. I am a compulsive reader, and fortunately my job requires that I keep up with all the disciplines that I cyberstalk.
As an undergrad I was very fortunate to have Jodye Selco as my mentor (she still is), the internet was starting to go mainstream, but overall, the people you interacted with in science were your department. Now I have science friends all over the world who I hear from on a regular basis. We share our ups and downs, challenges and triumphs, and we inspire each other to try new things, research in new directions. 15 years ago this was very difficult, now it’s almost embarrassingly simple and I for one revel in the online science community.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you integrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’ve had my own websites off and on since 1995, when I decided to change careers I started LibraryAdventures.com because I wanted a name that would be easy to remember (obviously no one was going to remember how to spell my name). As I’ve leaned more and more toward science I sometimes contemplate changing the name but I figure people who know me know that I’m pretty hard core about Science and Librarianship and those who want will keep reading and those who don’t can stop. My main social network is Twitter followed by LinkedIN with Facebook and Google+ trailing behind. I prefer the first two networks because I can scan them quickly to pick up trends in topics and see what people are up to.
I don’t completely separate work and personal online, as a general rule of thumb I post science and library related issues anytime with personal interest comments and links after hours and on weekends. Without these connections it would be impossible for me to even begin to keep up with all the areas I need to follow to do my job effectively. When I’m really busy I tend to post minimally and just allocate a few minutes here and there toward scanning so I don’t fall too far behind. If I feel overwhelmed I just stay offline for a bit. Overall I find this activity helps keep me focused, honest with myself, and connects me to the vast communities of scientists and librarians.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference? What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
I’m not sure when I first discovered science blogs, but I first encountered science online around 1997 when I helped write a chemistry lab to teach students to look for and evaluate scientific information online. I think my favorite blog is Kate Clancy’s Context and Variation although it’s very hard to decide between that and Carin Bondar’s Biology with a twist. Another favorite is Mathew Francis’ Galileo’s Pendulum.
The best aspect of Science Online was meeting a whole conference full of people who were enthusiastic about science, learning, and spreading information about science. The worst aspect was not having enough time to get to know everyone there!
In the future, assuming we all had tons of time and unlimited funds, I’d really like to have a summer version of Science Online because one 3 day meeting a year just isn’t enough time with all the wonderful people I’ve met through this unconference.
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, or to your science reading and writing?
For me the conference reinforced my theory that there’s always something new and interesting you can do with a science degree; if you don’t love your job keep trying new ones until you do, it’s a risk but one that’s paid off for dozens of Science Online attendees.
Thank you! I hope you can make it to ScienceOnline2012 in January.
A Blog Around The Clock 