A Blog Around The Clock

Janet Stemwedel a.k.a. Dr.Free-Ride is the blogmistress of Adventures in Ethics and Science and the Science Blogging Conference last month was her second appearance here – last year she was the Keynote Blogger-Speaker and this year she led a session on Science Blogging Ethics.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?
Hi Bora, thanks for having me!
I’m a middle-aged, almost mid-career academic who came from the East Coast to the San Francisco Bay Area for grad school and ended up staying. I’ve been teaching for more than half my life, parenting for going on nine years, and constantly renegotiating my relationship with the tribe of science without being able to quit it entirely.
I used to think I was going to be a chemist when I grew up — and went so far as to finish a Ph.D. in chemistry (focused on the dynamics of far-from-equilibrium chemical systems that display interesting behaviors like oscillations). But on the verge of packing up and starting a postdoc, it became clear to me that the questions that really captivated me weren’t so much questions in chemistry as questions about chemistry, and about science more generally.
Luckily, since I had double majored in chemistry and philosophy as an undergraduate, I knew that the kind of question keeping me up at night actually had a field of its own: the philosophy of science. The hard part was realizing that if I wanted to be a philosopher of science, I had to go back and do another Ph.D. There is nothing quite as surreal as defending your dissertation and then, two weeks later, sitting for the GREs.
Currently, my real life job title is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University. See Mom, I didn’t end up living on your couch!
What do you want to do/be when you grow up?
I’d like to be tenured. (Ask about that again at the end of May and I should know whether that aspiration was successful.)
Beyond that, I’d like to be a sort of “cool aunt” to the scientific community, especially to the people training to be scientists and trying to imagine themselves as grown-up scientists.
What do I mean by that? I’d like to give the advice and encouragement that people need to navigate the community, but that they feel awkward talking directly to their scientific “parents” about. (Don’t forget, sometimes it’s your relationship with the cool aunt that makes it possible for you to communicate better with your parents.) And I’d like to get that community of scientists talking to each other more than they seem to now about all sorts of things — like ethics, and different ways the scientific enterprise could be set up that might make life better for everyone.
Once I have that under control, I’d like to learn how to play drums.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while following the Conference?
I first came to science blogs by way of philosophy blogs — I found Panda’s Thumb through the dear departed Philosophy of Biology blog, and Pharyngula through Brian Leiter’s blog. I think Bitch Ph.D. was probably where I started coming across the more personal blogs by scientists about the patterns of academic life.
There are so many great science blogs that I’d be hard pressed to come up with a list of favorites shorter than my blogroll. Some that I started reading in earnest after SBC ’08 are I Love Science, Really, The Inverse Square Blog, and Pondering Pikaia.
How are science bloggers different from all the other bloggers in regards to ethical behavior online (and offline).
My sense is that the science-y neighborhoods of the blogosphere show a tendency to want to back up claims with evidence, and to want to “show the work” on the inferences drawn from the evidence. This isn’t to say that only the folks blogging about science do this, mind you, but it feels like this is part of our identity as scientists or friends of science. Reality is where we live, and we think it’s a pretty nice place most of the time.
I’m not sure I could say anything sensible about offline behavior without a much larger network of informants than I have in place at present.
A couple of years ago, there were attempts to write a Bloggers Code of Ethics, which were overwhelmingly rejected by bloggers of all kinds. More recently, some suggested writing a Science-Bloggers Code of Ethics. Why is this a bad idea?
I’m deeply suspicious of the power of codes per se to influence behavior. Most professions have professional organizations whose websites proclaim a list of principles to which members of those professions are officially committed. I’m willing to bet most people who belong to those organizations couldn’t tell you what’s in their code.
More than that, I don’t know that a particular set of rules can make people ethical. It may coax some letter-of-the-law compliance, and it will encourage folks to find loopholes, but robust ethical behavior comes from people who are in touch with their own values and in an ongoing conversation with the other people in their community about the shared interests, goals, and values that define them as a community. A code may sometimes capture the shared commitments that come out of such an ongoing dialogue, but I doubt that a code can force individual buy-in to the values or to the community.
What is the goal of the Science Blogging Ethics wiki?
The hope is to have a place for a continuing dialogue about our values as community of people blogging about science (in lots of different ways).
I think we can gain a lot by being in an ongoing discussion about what practices are better ones for our various aims, which seem to range from explaining scientific theory or research results to non-experts, to talking about methodology, or career development, or teaching, or what science has to do with everyday life, or what the everyday life of a scientist looks like. We can learn from each other’s experiences, including the mistakes. And one good outcome of such a discussion might be for people blogging about science to start seeing themselves as a community.
I noticed something interesting. Whenever there is a blog-war between sciblings, once it gets really red-hot and nasty, we all start checking out your blog, waiting for you to post about it. Then, when you do, and you tell one scibling to sit in the corner for 30 minutes and the other scibling to write “I will be nice to my sciblings” a hundred times on a piece of paper, everything calms down. Where does that authority of yours come from? The Friday Sprog Blogging? We are all very hot-headed and independent folks, yet we always agree that Janet has the last word. How come?
I don’t know that I have any special “authority” — certainly, the sprogs would dispute the assertion that I do — and I’m pretty sure I never literally sent anyone to the corner or to the chalkboard.
But, I do have this thing I do where I try to understand the source of disagreements, and to figure out where the different sides in the argument are coming from. At least in spats within the community of science bloggers, it’s hardly ever the case that one side is wrong about everything — the bloggers involved are too smart, and too committed to some kind of intellectual honesty. So I generally go in trying to work out what each side is trying to get across, and why the other side isn’t getting it.
This probably comes from my philosophical training to come up with the least crazy thing your opponent could be claiming before you offer a good argument against it. Maybe there’s also a little bit of parental patience in there, too. But I’d guess that what really motivates me to try to be the voice of reason heading off blogwars in the science district of blogtopia is that I feel like I *know* a lot of the people involved well before the shouting starts. I start from the assumption that these people I know and like and respect can find some common ground, and that they’re more interested in working out how things actually are than in just winning the argument.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean there aren’t disagreements that persist. But I think we can find ways to engage each other and explore these disagreements that aren’t just shouting matches.
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 student blogging panel — especially, the discussion on that panel of advisors who take a dim view of blogging graduate students — made me think hard about what part we professorial types should play in changing the academic culture. If any time away from work is seen as an indication of insufficient commitment, that’s either going to convince budding scientists (or academics of other stripes) that they’re not allowed to have other facets of their lives, or that they have to hide them. We can do better. I hope that openly having a life beyond my research and teaching, and arguing in my tenure dossier that my blogging is a kind of engagement with the larger world that enhances my professional activities rather than undercutting them, will start to shift the expectations in a more humane direction.
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview.
It’s always fun to see you, Bora! I hope that one of the next times we see each other we can celebrate your defending your dissertation.
Gulp…
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Check out all the interviews in this series.

Ryan Somma is a software developer from coastal North Carolina who blogs on Ideonexus. It’s all a blur now, but I think the Science Blogging Conference last month was his second.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?
Scientific Background? (Looking around nervously.) Why do you wanna know? Ummm… My father was head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, and my mother teaches Nursing there. I rebelled against them by majoring in English and smoking lots of pot… The security guards at my high school nicknamed me “Professor.” Does that count?
I fell in love with science when I experienced an iconoclasm after reading Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, which I picked up to learn why religious beliefs were silly and unsupportable, instead I learned that my belief in alien abductions was silly and unsupportable. I wanted to learn what else I was wrong about, and Science, while not “truth” with a capital-T, is the closest approximation to it. Really, my science background is immersing myself in online resources, like ScienceBlogs.
During the day I write Aviation Logistics Management Software for the Coast Guard… poorly..
You are a volunteer at The Port Discover Science Center. Can you tell us more about The Port Discover Science Center and what you do there?
Yes! The Port Discover Science Center is one-room in downtown Elizabeth City that brings daily science activities to the children of this small town, where I’ve ended up. They run on a yearly budget of less than $60k, which is amazing considering all the activities they host there.
My role has been largely one of benefactor. I’ve donated and maintained computers for the center, set up a flight simulator, provided DVDs, software, a projector, sound-system, build exhibits, etc, etc. I’ve done what I can to ensure they have a wide variety of daily exhibits. There should be little Science Centers like this all over the place. They should be like churches, building community bonds everywhere.
What do you want to do/be when you grow up?
Vice President of Cool. Duh.
What is the role of Azrael in the Tragedy of the Commons?
Hmmmm… sustaining herself off her master’s scraps… subservient to a greedy and decrepit old man… flee-ridden… I think Azrael represents George Bush. He’s pretty-much the Oil Industry’s and Dick Cheney’s pet, and Gargamel does a good job of representing those interests.
Only, a pet nematode would more accurately reflect George Bush’s intelligence and invertebrate nature, don’t you think?
(Sidenote: I recieved a lot of hate mail for that article, which I’m cultivating a thick skin towards. I aspire to one day handling criticism with PZ Meyer’s sharp wit.)
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while following the Conference?
That’s the best part of the conference! Discovering all these new leads for information. I’ve been very impressed with the intellectual content and classical references in Thomas Levenson’s Inverse Square Blog as well as Eric Roston’s Carbon Nation, and the Bibliophilism of John Dupuis’ Confessions of a Science Librarian. It’s so cool to find so many like-minded intellectuals.
Meeting you kids in person gave me deeper insight and appreciation of blogs I was familiar with, but not always reading intensely. The sessions with Dr Rundkvist’s Aardvarchaeology gave me a new outlook on his blog’s voice, while the session with Dr. Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science gave me a better appreciation for one of her blog’s main subjects.
I think Science Blogs has been awesome. You guys have made scientists accessible, while maintaining your oftentimes-erudite-incomprehensibility. On my blog I started collecting Science Proponents in my FaceBook friends, like you, Bora, which is like collecting sports cards, only scientists.
Your blog posts are quite provocative, yet in person you seem quite shy. Now that you have met a bunch of bloggers in person, do they behave differently than what you could guess from their online personas? Is this ability for people to experiment and be who they want to be online a positive transformative experience that, for instance, teenagers should experience as a part of growing up?
Figuring out who you are online is a fantastic experience. I was figuring it out in Elementary School on the BBSes (before the Webbernets) using my Commodore 64. Online, you can be whatever you want to be in a world of pure ideas. My only concern for teens is that they should do it anonymously. There’s more freedom that way, and you don’t have to worry about something stupid you posted in the heat of the moment haunting you years later when you’ve grown out of it.
The biggest thing that really got me meeting all these Science Blogging heroes was that so many of them are kids with “Dr” in front of their names. I thought people with doctorates were supposed to be old and feeble and smoke pipes and wear cardigans!!! How dare you all be human?!?! : )
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview.
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Check out all the interviews in this series.

John Dupuis has been writing Confessions of a Science Librarian since the time blogging software was really physically soft, being made of clay and shaped like a tablet. We finally got to meet face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference last month – a meeting long overdue until then.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. This is going to be an interesting reversal – it is usually you who gets to ask the questions in blog interviews. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background?
Yes, it is a bit of a reversal. But I’m not crazy enough to try and interview 40 people in 40 days, more like one every other month or so. And don’t worry, Bora, I will get around to returning the favour and interviewing you!
As for me, I’m currently the Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I’ve been at York since August 2000. However, like with so many librarians, this is my second career. My first career was as a software developer for a large multinational insurance broker, something I did for over 12 years. That was in Montreal, where I was born. I also have a undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Concordia University. Ultimately, I noticed that the thing I liked best about the software developer job was helping people with their information needs, to find the stuff they need to make decisions in their jobs. So, when various takeover and downsizing exercises began to wear me down a bit, I had a chance to really think about what I wanted to do: get a new job in the same industry or change careers entirely.
After some deep thought, I decided that it was time for a career change. Having some family and close friends already in library biz, it seemed like a natural progression for me. So, it was back to school for a Library and Information Science degree at McGill; while there I worked at the McGill Physical Sciences & Engineering Library for a practicum placement and got bitten by the science librarian bug. It was a great place to work with a passionate, commited staff
dedicated to helping faculty and students. Luckily, when I graduated a job came open at York in the science library and the rest, as they say, is history. Okay, the process of relocating from Montreal to Toronto was a bit more complicated than that but there are some things I’ll only tell over beer in a hotel bar.
I’ve been writing my blog, Confessions of a Science Librarian, since October 2002. It really started as a bit of a lark. One day I was sitting in my office wondering what these new-fangled blogs were all about. Something strange possessed me and I went to the Blogger site and started my own blog. I wish I could take credit for the title, but I have to admit it was suggested to me by my friend and York colleague Patti Ryan. I don’t think I ever expected it to have the long life that it’s had — 5.5 years is quite ancient by blog standards. It’s made me a lot of friends and opened a few doors that might otherwise stayed closed. I feel priveledged to be part of two wonderful blogging communities, science blogs and library blogs.
What is your Real Life job? What does it mean to be a Science Librarian?
My real life job is helping people. The people I help are mostly undergraduate students and I help them mostly with how to find scholarly, peer reviewed resources in science and engineering. (Okay, I also help them to find the bathroom and clear paper jams in the photocopier.) I sit at our Help Desk answering questions, I buy books and decide what journals and databases to subscribe to, I advocate for Open Access resources, I give Literature Search Skills sessions in science and engineering classrooms, I sit on committees and go to meetings. I try not to shush rowdy students too often, but my library is pretty small and we get complaints if it gets too noisy. Yes, the modern student still appreciates a bit of peace and quiet.
The great thing is that we librarians at York have faculty status so I also have a form of tenure and get to take sabbaticals every seventh year. I just came back from my first last August.
And I think a lot about what it will mean to be a science librarian in the future. But more on that in a couple of questions.
What do you want to do/be when you grow up?
Well, when I was a little kid, I wanted to be Jean Beliveau. And then a little later I wanted to join The Legion of Super-Heroes or perhaps become The Warlord. Somehow those desires morphed into programming and libraries. What would the future hold, in the perfect world? I’ve always dreamed of having one of those big, cluttered, cozy, serendipitous used bookstores, just hanging out with others that love books, science, science fiction, mysteries, comics, and all the rest. However, I’m not too sure what kind of future those venerable institutions have these days, so I’ll probably have to come up with something else for my retirement.
Internet has turned the job of a librarian upside down. What does that mean specifically for science librarians?
The future of my particular profession is an issue that has really obsessed me over the last couple of years. I’ve written about it extensively on my blog and I’ve even given a presentation on it at a recent conference. Whipping through those conference slides is probably the best way to get an overview of what my current thinking is.
In fact, the more I think about it, the less I seem to have a grasp about what the future brings. There are big challenges ahead for academic libraries. How do you get your physical layout just right, the balance between computer workstations, relaxing comfy chairs with coffee, group study rooms, informal collaborative spaces and, perhaps the thing that gets lost in the shuffle, quiet space for study and contemplation.
The other question that really obsesses me is what’s worth paying for? We libraries have pretty significant budgets, mostly dedicated to journal and database subscriptions. Ultimately, what do we want to be spending this money on? For sure, more people to embed in labs and research groups, like Peter Murray-Rust suggests. People to build a compelling web presence, to make the stuff we buy more visible on the free web (we call this “discovery at the network level”), people to work with faculty on teaching students about scholarly communication. But what about stuff? Surely, we won’t be buying a lot of paper books in the future but products like Morgan & Claypool’s Synthesis, Knovel ebooks and O’Reilly’s Safari are fantastic products, well worth paying for. It’s no coincidence that I’ve interviewed people from all three of those companies: Mike Morgan, Sasha Gurke) and CJ Rayhill. I want to understand what makes them tick and how they’re going to adapt and change in the future.
But how to let people know we have all those great products and how much time and effort they can save students and researchers? It seems to me that outreach, liaison and marketing are huge parts of what a librarian has to do these days.
Other things probably worth paying for are online journal backfiles like Nature back to the first issue. Now that’s expensive, but probably worth every penny. There are also a lot of datasets and other databases that are proprietary and well worth paying for. Are abstracting and indexing databases like Web of Science or INSPEC still worth paying for? Just barely, but that might change in the future. How about SciFinder Scholar? Sure, they add a lot of value to the data they use with cool structure search and the like.
And look at what’s happening in the High Energy Physics field with the SCOAP3 project! Imagine a world where libraries could band together to pay publishers to make their journals all Open Access. It’s almost a utopian dream.
So, as the information landscape continues to get more and more complicated, the life of a science librarian hurtles on into the future surrounded by uncertainty but still finding ways to contribute to the scientific enterprise and make a difference in the lives of students and researchers.

In discussions of Open Access on science blogs, at meetings, between scientists and publishers, most people talk about Gold, while librarians appear to prefer Green approach to Open Access. Can you explain to my readers what is the difference between the two and if you could speculate why people with different backgrounds may prefer one or the other?
First, Definitions. And I have to admit that being colour-challenged (see below), I tend to have a hard time remembering stuff associated with colours anyway. Green Open Access is promoting OA via encouraging authors to self-archive a version of their acticles in some sort of Open Access venue, whether it be their own web page, an Institutional Repository or some sort of disciplinary repository (such as the physics arxiv). Here Open Access to scholarship isn’t dependant on the whims of the publishers, but on the intentions of the authors. And this is pretty important because not all fields have access to a wide range of OA journals or even disciplinary repositories. Of course, authors do need to respect the copyright rules of the publishers; Sherpa RoMEO is a good source for the various rules used by different journals and publishers.
Gold Open Access is publishing in Open Access journals. This is obviously the best way to go, as all the articles published in OA journals are free to the world. But, like I said, some disciplines are poorly served here. Most of the humanities and social sciences and pretty well all the engineering fields, for example. Although, even some of these areas are seeing improvement.
As for librarians vs the rest, I have to admit I’ve never really thought about it this way. I guess librarians see Green as something we can have a more direct role in implementing and promoting, although many libraries now host Open Access journals on their own servers (York’s hosted journals are here, although they’re not all OA). I think librarians are also maybe somewhat resigned to the fact that it’ll still be quite some time before we see a majority of all scholarly articles published in OA journals and in the meantime Green OA is a good way to get stuff out there. Computer Science, for example, is a field where maybe 80-90% of recent articles are posted on the authors’ web pages. On the other hand, in fields that don’t already have a strong tradition in Green OA, it’s almost impossible to get people to post their articles in, say, Institutional Repositories.
Realistically, I think it’ll be at least 5 to maybe 10 years before we see a widely dispersed OA tipping point, and a variety of publishing business models will still exist beyond that point. I hope I’m wrong, but I think my New York Giants were a better bet to win the Super Bowl.
As for researchers, well, read Peter Suber’s Trends Favoring Open Access, I think he makes a good point on item #29:

Researchers themselves control the rate of progress toward OA, but after all these years most of them are still oblivious to its existence and benefits. As I’ve noted above, there is a trend toward greater familiarity and understanding. But there is also a longstanding counter-trend of impatience with anything that distracts attention from research. This preoccupation is generally admirable and makes researchers good at what they do. But even from the narrow perspective of what advances research, it is having perverse consequences and limiting the audience, impact, and utility of the research on which scholars are so single-mindedly focused.

I think the situation is more complex than an either/or with librarians and researchers working in different directions and more of a situation where if we all work together we can make more progress.
If Jorge Luis Borges lived today and was Internet-savvy, how do you think he would envision and describe the Library of Babel? Something like Gordon R. Dickson’s The Final Encyclopedia or more like Vernor Vinge’s Libraeorome Project in The Rainbows End? What is your own vision?
Good question. Kind of a cross between YouTube and Wikipedia? With half the shelves filled with porn, a quarter with news on Britney Spears, 12.5% with creationism and woo, 6.25% with racist sites, 3.125% with pirated music, 1.5625% with videos of teenagers lip-syncing pop songs and the rest with something useful.
My own vision? You know that old Star Trek episode where Spock goes back in time and hooks up with a cave woman (All Our Yesterdays)? They pass through a kind of library-like portal into the past. That’s where I’d like to work!
If you could tell scitech faculty and students one thing about your job, what would it be.
Basically, I’m here to help you.
For faculty, I would say, “let my colleagues and me help you teach your students about the literature of science, where it is, how it’s created and how to find it.” There’s a bit of a vacuum these days. So often it seems to me that faculty members just assume that new grad students (for example) know how to find the good stuff, but they don’t. Interestingly, it’s often the newest faculty members that are the most open to collaborating with librarians to teach students about these things. We’ve made a lot of inroads at York the last few years, collaborating with science and engineering faculty to help students learn about finding scholarly resources. Believe it or not, I even have a blog where I host pages for the courses I help with! (http://www.yorku.ca/yul/cse/) Take a look and you can see some of the kinds of things I talk about. It’s been quite successful with students and faculty seem to like it too. Some days I’ve had as many as 5 or 6 messages or chat sessions with students using the Meebo plugin.
For students, I’d say, “Don’t be shy!” I’d like to tell them that your librarian is your best friend.
For grad students, you may not believe it, you may be getting by just fine, but especially at the beginning of your career we can really help. There may be things your supervisor assumes you know about, assumes you understand, assumes you know how to find. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing. Every year I get the new Computer Science grad students at York for an hour as part of their orientation and that’s what we talk about. What’s a journal, what’s a conference, what’s the best and easiest way to find the peer reviewed stuff your profs expect you to find. And, while we’re at it, what’s peer review, the invisible college, all that stuff. They appreciate it and the faculty appreciate it too.
And the same kind of message for undergrads: Don’t be shy. Come to the reference desk, chat with me on Meebo or send me an email or a message on FaceBook. When your prof asks you to find 3 peer reviewed articles on recycling asphalt, I can connect you with some full text online pretty fast.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
Well, I actually discovered library blogs first. I was reading some before I started my blog, like EngLib, STLQ, LISNews and (Library Stuff and a few others. I think the first science blog I started reading was See Jane Compute, and probably Chris Leonard’s dear departed Computing Chris blog when he was at Elsevier (My recent interview with Chris, now at PhysMath Central). I don’t think I got into science blogs in a big way until the first iteration of ScienceBlogs came online a couple of years ago. It seems to me that a big part of my job is to understand how science and scientists tick and science blogs are a really important part of that for me.
As for favourites, I don’t think I need to plug any of the ScienceBlogs stable here! In any case, the ones I follow the closest are in computer science and software development:
– See Jane Compute by Jane (Whom I also interviewed)
– Adventures in Applied Math by Rebecca
– Knowing and Doing by Eugene Wallingford
– Computational Complexity by Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch
– Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood
– Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
– The Yourdon Report by Ed Yourdon
At the conference itself, a couple of the really interesting new ones I discovered are The Inverse Square Blog by Tom Levenson and Science and Religion News by Salman Hameed. Tom’s getting mentioned in a lot of these interviews — I think he owes us all a beer at the next conference for all the free publicity.
Of course, my newest favourite is the blog my 15-year-old son has started for a school project: Space Exploration and Us! If he keeps it up, maybe I’ll bring him to the conference next year.
Is there anything that happened at the Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote, a new friendship – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
A couple of things really stood out for me. The first was the incredible sense of community among the bloggers. Everybody was so open and friendly and willing to talk about just about anything, at the restaurant, the conference and at the hotel bar. For example, did you know that Bill Hooker and I share red-green colour blindness? And talking about community, believe it or not I was chatting with a fellow science blogger right up until the very minute I boarded my plane for Toronto! That would be Deepak Singh, who was stuck at the airport at the same time waiting for his flight. The other thing that stood out was a sense of possibilities, that with enough ingenuity and elbow grease, we could use blogs for just about anything. The great discussions in David Warlick’s session were genuinely inspirational. Hearing about what Salman Hameed is doing with blogs in his Science & Religion course was great, and then getting to sit down and talk to him about it in depth was even better.
It was so nice to finally meet you and thank you for the interview.
Thanks for the opportunity to unleash my geeky librarian soul on the world. Oh yeah, there are two of my blog interviews that I didn’t plug yet: Timo Hannay of Nature and Richard Akerman of CISTI. Both great interviews!
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Check out all the interviews in this series.

I discovered Pondering Pikaia less than a year ago and it has immediately become one of my favourite daily reads. Thus, I was very happy that Anne-Marie Hodge could come to the Science Blogging Conference last month so she could meet with all the other science bloggers in person.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job?
Thanks, Bora, I feel really honored to be an interviewee! Let’s see, who am I…I grew up in a military family, so I moved around quite a bit and don’t really have a home town. My parents are originally from Tennessee, though, and we generally think of ourselves as being from the south. My Real Life job is currently “student,” although I prefer to think of myself as a zoologist-in-training. I’m an undergrad, in my junior year, majoring in Zoology/Conservation and Biodiversity and minoring in Anthropology. I work as a research assistant on various projects in the biology department, and I earn grocery money tutoring, mostly genetics but other random biology classes also.
For a long time I actually planned on pursuing a law career, but after I took AP Biology in high school I realized that I definitely belong in science. I haven’t looked back since. I started college as a pre-vet major (actually Zoology/Pre-Vet, my school has five or six tracks in Zoology), but I had some opportunities to do field research and realized that the questions I am most interested in answering are more related to ecology, conservation, etc than to medicine, and I switched my Zoology concentration from Pre-Vet to Conservation and Biodiversity, and added an Anthropology minor. One thing about conservation that often gets overlooked is how people-oriented any policy has got to be. I think studying anthro has definitely helped me in how I think about different problems facing biodiversity. You can know your organism/ecosystem inside out and have an amazing management plan, but if you aren’t effective at understanding and working with the local people you’re never going to maximize your potential for success.
So that is my background, what else…I have a dog, Charlie. He outsmarts me on a daily basis, but that’s one of the fun things about owning German shepherds, they keep you on your toes! He was actually a rescue case, he was severely abused by his previous owner. It has taken a lot of work and time but he’s made a total 180 since I first got him. We like to hike, and I rock climb when I have time, although time is pretty hard to come by these days: I am carrying 18 hours of classes in addition to work and being an officer in a couple of organizations, I’m still trying to figure out how to squeeze more than 24 hours into a day. My favorite activity outside of class is working on projects (volunteer clean-ups, educational outreach, monthly speakers, etc) with my school’s chapter of Society for Conservation Biology. I started the chapter here last year and we’ve been growing steadily. It’s been a lot of work getting it off the ground, but I am really happy with how it is turning out!
What do you want to do/be when you grow up?
After grad school I plan on trying to find a position as a faculty member at a university, so I can continue to do field research while also doing my part to help train the next generation of biologists. I can see myself working for a conservation organization for a few years right after grad school if the opportunity arises, but my ultimate plan is to settle in to a life in academia. I’m interested in doing research on the behavioral ecology and population dynamics of carnivores, especially canids, and how those patterns can be used to more effectively manage populations to prevent declines/extinctions.
I have always loved writing, and I feel pretty strongly about the importance of promoting science awareness, so I also plan to continue the habit of writing about science as a side project, either in blog form or otherwise in the future.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
My story is similar to Brian’s answer in his interview: I was a Pharyngula reader originally, and he was my gateway drug to the blogosphere. I followed him when he joined SB and discovered a whole world of fascinating science bloggers. The community has definitely grown since I first started reading!
It’s very hard to pick favorites, some of the ones most related to my own interests (zoology and evolution) are Laelaps, Tetrapod Zoology, Evolving Thoughts, Catalogue of Organisms, and Gene Expression, but I really enjoy reading posts from other fields as well. Since I’m hoping to have a job as a professor someday, I always enjoy reading Adventures in Ethics and Science, On Being a Scientist and a Woman, and Female Science Professor. Right now my perspective is from the student side of university life, but I am always very interested in reading tales from the other side of the lecture podium.
Your blog is quite new, yet your series on Science of Harry Potter was very popular and a post of yours won its entry into the Open Laboratory 2007. Did this fast success take you by surprise? Can you explain it?
I first started my blog a little over two years ago, just as a place to mention science news stories I found interesting, and in the beginning stages entries were pretty sporadic. This past summer I really increased my posting activity, which is when I began to start making connections and getting more notice. The Harry Potter Science series was definitely an attention-grabber, and I think that’s when I started to really accumulate some links and become more known (thanks in great part to Bora’s enthusiasm about the series!).
I was surprised at how fast my readership grew once it finally did start to increase. I think that all bloggers should read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. He discusses how big shifts in success or recognition can result from meeting just a few of the right people, “hubs” that can bring notice to you on a much wider scale. My blog was already beginning to increase its readership when I read that book, but if I’d read it sooner I think I would have been smarter about finding more outlets for promoting my blog in its early days (carnivals, more linkbacks, more comments on other blogs, etc).
You often write about the topics related to the classes you take at any given moment. Are you using your blog as a “learning tool” in a sense? Grappling with new knowledge, simplifying its complexity, and clarifying it to yourself by putting it in writing?
I do sometimes get material for posts from classes, usually when I find a case study or example especially interesting and want to research it further. This semester I’m taking fewer zoology classes than I did last fall, so there has been less of that (plus I’ve had less time for posting in general this spring!). But yes, writing a blog post based on course material does definitely help me to master the material better, because I do have to reorganize and resynthetise the information in order to create my own narrative. Also, I always look up extra information and often the post snowballs quite a bit because the farther I get into the details, the more fascinated I become.
I make an effort not to turn Pondering Pikaia into a “this is what I learned in school today” series, but making occasional posts that were inspired by class lectures definitely has benefits. On more than one occasion I have taken exams that featured essay questions on an exact topic that I posted about! The dicyemida story, from Invertebrate Biodiversity, and the two gynogenesis and a hybridogenesis posts, from Vertebrate Biodiversity, are all examples of this. That ended up working out great for me: I nailed the essay questions because I had already looked up a lot of supporting information and composed a written explanation of the topics.
At your session (Student Blogging) you mentioned that you have been contacted by potential graduate advisors? Why do you think they are interested in taking you in as a graduate student? Do you think this reversal of roles (they are knocking on your door instead of you knocking on theirs) is something we will see more often in general, or is this the particular case of the openness of the ecological community, or is it something about the way you write on your blog?
A couple of professors have dropped me notes in comments or e-mails. None have made official offers, usually it is just a brief message saying that I appear to have ideas and interests that could fit into their research programs, and to drop them an e-mail when I am shopping around for schools. This has definitely been exciting and a little intimidating! I always assume that *everyone* reads anything that I post, so I am not nervous about what anyone might find in the content of my blog, but I do sometimes fear that people with misconceptions about blogs in general might be turned off if they find out an applicant is a blogger. Having some positive feedback from Real Live Professors has eased my mind about this a little.
I do think that the internet is changing the way applications and recruitment are handled. I’m definitely a member of the “Facebook generation,” and among my peers it’s pretty much taken for granted that everyone has some presence on the internet, whether it’s Facebook, Myspace, a blog, a LiveJournal, or any other of the millions of personal accounts/pages people can accumulate. This makes it much easier to check people out when they apply, which is something to be aware of (keep your drunken party pictures to yourself!). That may hurt some people if they’re irresponsible about how they portray themselves, but having the chance to represent yourself and your career goals to the public also increases the chance that someone will come across your information and become interested in you. So I think that everyone involved can benefit from the new dynamics, professors have a chance to get MUCH more information on applicants than they could in the past, and students/job-seekers have a much higher visibility and many more ways to communicate their qualifications, provided they’re smart about keeping their content professional.
Is there anything that happened at the Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote, a new friendship – 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?
One thing that has been an issue for me in the past is a slight inferiority complex. I am extremely aware that I am younger and have less formal education than most of the other science bloggers and blog readers. I always worry about not being taken seriously, that people will assume my opinions are naive (and thus not take the time to really read them) or dismiss me as just a silly college kid. Meeting everyone at the conference, though, definitely helped to assuage those fears. Everyone was extremely friendly, and I was definitely made to feel like “one of the crowd,” I had a great time and came back feeling more like a peer in the blogging community.
As far as topics that were covered at the conference, I thought the sessions about open access issues were very important, especially the one about how to make science literature more available in developing nations. I am so glad that PLoS has taken off recently. This semester I’ve tried to do my part in the open access movement by blogging more papers from open-access sources and also making a point of using PLoS for class assignments, and a couple of my professors have been very excited to learn about the site. They’ve made announcements about PLoS in class, hopefully it will help the upcoming generation of scientists to see open access as more of the norm. Like I mentioned above, it’s pretty much taken for granted that we all have information free to the public via online memberships and accounts, I hope that in the future open access science will become the default instead of an exception.
Let’s see, other pivotal conference experiences…I managed to get my picture taken with Professor Steve Steve. At that moment, my entire trip became a success. 😉
One last slightly random note, I know the bad weather made travel a little stressful that weekend, but I have been living in the southeast for a long time now and it was the first time I had seen a single flake of snow in over four years, it was a big deal! Here in Alabama, I kid you not, I have literally seen people taking pictures of frosty windshields because freezes are such novelty.
It was so nice to finally meet you and thank you for the interview.
Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity!
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Check out all the interviews in this series.

Kevin Zelnio celebrates invertebrates on his blog The Other 95% and, at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago, it was announced that he has joined the Deep Sea News blog and thus officially became a SciBling (with all the associated hazing rituals involving beer).
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?
I’m a PhD student at Penn State hopefully in my final year. My scientific training is in invertebrate zoology and marine ecology. I study the ecology of deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities at the Eastern Lau Spreading Center which is conveniently situated between Fiji and Tonga! I am also into taxonomy and describe some of the many new species we find there.
What do you want to do/be when you grow up?
A jack of all trades. I want to be a writer, a museum curator for inverts, a taxonomist, gentleman naturalist, a folk musician and work in the open access publishing movement.
You went down in the submersible Alvin. Can you tell us how did that happen and what did you do there?
I was an overenthusiastic undergraduate at University of California – Davis where i majored in Evolution and Ecology and (almost) Geology. I was taking a 1-unit seminar course in hydrothermal vents for fun. My professors were invited to go on a cruise to the East Pacific Rise, which is off the coast of Central America and Mexico, to run the night operations using a towed camera. This was a biological cruise headed by Janet Voight, a curator at the Field Museum. They asked if I wanted to come along for a little month long boat ride in the middle of my fall quarter. Of which I replied HELL YEAH!! As the undergrad, I was affectionately referred to as the “ship’s bitch” and worked a lot with the video and helping other researchers with their work. I found my talent of sorting through muck to find critters. A talent that basically became my PhD now. There were only a limited number of Alvin dives on the expedition and only 2 scientists can dive a day, pending no severe weather (of which we undoubtedly had a few days of). I wasn’t really expecting I’d ever get to go down, but always hoping. I even shaved off my beard for the time since I could grow facial hair in preparation (so the emergency oxygen masks makes an airtight seal around the face – a requirement to dive). Eventually I was approached and asked if I wanted to dive the next day. Of which I replied HELL YEAH!! After locking me in the sub with a pilot to make sure I didn’t have any claustrophobic tendencies, and double checking to make sure the oxygen mask fit my face, I was briefed and ready to go!
It was an 8 hour ride in total and U N B E L I E V A B L E in every way. It took 45 minutes to descend 2.5 kilometers. The color of the ocean turns a darker and darker shade of blue until you reach the maximum depth limit of light and nothing but blackness all around you. I saw fish and luminous jellies and plankton on the way down. After a while the sub pilot put the lights on and within minutes I could see the ocean bottom approaching. It was barren and lifeless and as we touched down a puff of sediment was kicked up by Alvin’s thruster and I felt as if I had just landed on the moon. Eventually I saw fish here, a sea whip there. Then BAM! An enormous black smoker appeared before me brimming with 2 meter tubeworms with red plumes wavering in the current. We were just centimeters from the 300C hydrothermal fluid and toxic metals and gases. One error and you can “burn” a hole right throw the plexiglass portal. Thankfully the Alvin sub pilots are exceptionally skilled. Our objectives were to retrieve some experiments left on the seafloor for a graduate student and retrieve water samples of the hydrothermal fluid for a chemist that was also in the sub with me. I also video-taped as much as I could trying to find unusual behaviors, predation, just taking it all in and taking notes for the other senior scientist. At the end of the dive we dropped weights and the ascent took an hour and half. I still have a vivid image of that day. It was a turning point in my life.

[Image from here]
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I guess I never really knew what blogs were until maybe a little over a year ago. I had been reading Deep Sea News irregularly for awhile because when I googled something I was interested in about the deep sea it always came up! Eventually I started commenting on the site and about that time I realized that this was a blog.
I have so many favorites, I keep track of them in Google Reader. I read my co-moderators (from the Real Time Blogging in the Marine Sciences session) blogs religiously: Cephalopodcast; Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets; The Beagle Project and Deep Sea News. I love Snail’s Tales, I guess his was one of the first blogs I found when I started my own blog. Since the conference I’ve gotten much more into reading some of my fellow sciblings blogs. Quite a few blogs have made it into my Reader of people I met and had good interactions with at the Conference. The Inverse Square blog, Pondering Pikaia and Museum of Life + Science blog are 3 that jump out at me right now.
Most people classify blogs into personal, political, tech, medical, etc. Your classification divides blogs into two categories: above and below 200m. Care to explain?
Deep Sea News is all about reporting on the largest environment on earth. By somewhat arbitrary definition, “deep” is characterized by roughly everything under 200-400 meters. Photosynthesis is really hampered beyond 200 and light is virtually gone by 400. There is easily enough going on down there to cover a post a day minimum. Its a very exciting and dynamic place to be!
If it was technically feasible, would you blog WHILE diving?
Probably not. Maybe Twitter updates though. You can’t waste too much time since you got only one shot at getting your research or observations done and the sub is pretty expensive to operate. The last objective of our dive plan is always “Don’t F@#$ up!” If I had my own sub then naturally! Craig, Peter and I at Deep Sea News are in the process of obtaining a blog submersible.
What are your personal experiences about the pros and cons of blogging as a science graduate student?
Its a tough balance. I really like writing and communicating my passion and enthusiasm about the ocean and invertebrates. This is my outlet for me to do what I want to do for no other reason than I want to. I do not have the support of advisor, he views blogs as a waste of time and career stopper. I respectfully disagree of course and view writing a blog post as no more a waste of time as watching an hour or two of TV or reading a book. Blogging has also given me greater confidence and understanding in science. I am famously known in my lab as the most up to date person on research in the marine environment. That’s because I am reading and then blogging about all this great research being produced by other scientists. Writing about something helps me to retain that information and treat it more critically.
Is there anything that happened at the Conference – a session, something someone said or did, a new friendship – 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 whole conference was a real eye-opener for me. I’ve been to several science conferences in my field of research but that was by far the best conference I’ve attended. I came away from it all with a revitalized interest and several ideas of which to improve myself. I will definitely take it more seriously, meaning that I will edit my posts, write more clearly and succinctly, and make better use of online tools and technologies. I must say though the student blogging panel was a great discussion and I am impressed of the caliber of knowledge of breadth that these undergrads and grad students have and how well they communicate. It gives me hope for the future.
It was so nice to see you in person and thank you for the interview.
The pleasure was truly mine and I look forward to making SciBlogCon a regular thing.
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Check out all the interviews in this series.