Another installment in the series of posts introducing attendees/participants of ScienceOnline2011. You can find them all on the list, but it may help if you get them in smaller chunks, focusing on a few at a time.
Jason Goldman is a graduate student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California. He blogs about cognitive neuroscience in people and other animals at The Thoughtful Animal and Child’s Play and he tweets. He is this year’s editor of Open Laboratory anthology of the best writing on science blogs.
Mike Lisieski is a student of Psychology and Pharmacology at the University at Buffalo. He blogs at Cephalove on the Gam network and he tweets.
Hannah Waters got her degree in biology, focusing on ecology, but now works as a laboratory technician in a cell and molecular biology lab in Philadelphia and is planning on going in that direction in grad school. She blogs on Culturing Science and Sleeping with the Fishes and is on Twitter.
I went to the NASW meeting (you can watch my panel if you go here and scroll down to “Rebooting science journalism: Adapting to the new media landscape”).
And it is over! The submission deadline has just passed. No more submissions will be accepted for the 2010 edition of the Open Laboratory.
Jason has lined up an impressive list of judges who will immediately start receiving their first judging lists and will start the complex process of winnowing down almost 900 entries into the final 50 essays/stories, one poem, one piece of art (for the cover) and one cartoon/comic strip. As usual, the book will be published with Lulu.com and we’ll try to have the book ready roughly in time for ScienceOnline2011 (we always say that, I know, but this time we’ll really try hard!)
In the meantime, while this process is ongoing, you can use this post, this collection almost 900 links, as a summary of the year, a sample and a cross-section of the best that happened on science blogs over the past twelve months. A snapshot of history! Quite a collection!
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
As I do every year, I will do a series of posts introducing attendees/participants of ScienceOnline2011. You can find them all on the list, but it may help if you get them in smaller chunks, focusing on a few at a time.
Stacy Baker aka Miss Baker is the Biology Teacher at Staten Island Academy, as well as a graduate student in Teacher Education in Science at Columbia University. She blogs at Using Blogs in Science Education and tweets. Her Biology classroom blog is Extreme Biology. Together with Rachel Ward, Science Department Chair at the Staten Island Academy, Stacy will bring, for the third year in a row, eight of her students who will lead a session. I wrote about their 2009 session here and interviewed Miss Baker here. The students are always a hit at ScienceOnline, and they also have an entire category devoted to it on their blog.
Christie Wilcox is a Graduate Student in Cell and Molecular Biology at University of Hawaii in Honolulu studying fish population genetics and venom biochemistry, and a Graduate Assistant at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. She blogs on Observations of a Nerd and is on Twitter. Back in April, I interviewed Christie for the blog – you can read it here.
Lisa Jarvis is the senior editor at Chemical & Engineering News. She blogs at Haystack and is on Twitter.
Dave Munger is a writer in Davidson, NC. He blogs on Word Munger, though his old blogs Cognitive Daily and Daily Monthly are probably better known, as they were pioneering what at the time was a new style of science blogging. Dave is also the founder of Researchblogging.org and one of the founders of Scienceblogging.org. And, of course, he can be also found on Twitter. My 2008 interview with Dave is here.
November series of blog posts on the Scientific American Guest Blog concludes with the head-scratcher by Scicurious about a drug whose ineffectiveness calls into question the very definition of depression and all the research into it: The antidepressant reboxetine: A ‘headdesk’ moment in science. Head on over, read and comment.
Welcome to the 81st 82nd edition of Encephalon, neuroscience blog carnival that keeps dying and getting resurrected over and over again. Let’s hope it keeps going for a long time again, as it collects some of the best writing about the brain, mind and behavior on science blogs. Including this month’s edition – a great collection of entries, if I may say so myself! Without further ado, instead of wasting your time on long introductions, I will let you dig in and enjoy:
Sandeep Gautam who has fallen into The Mouse Trap sent out a message – Personality and Motivation looks at a paper linking Big Five personality traits (FFM) with their underlying motivational reaction norms.
Dr.Romeo Vitelli of Providentia contributes two posts: The Opium Eater on one of the first “psychenauts” and a literary giant, to boot, and Born to be Wild – One of the more recent genetics= violence controversies to be hashed out in the media.
As I do every year, I will do a series of posts introducing attendees/participants of ScienceOnline2011. You can find them all on the list, but it may be helpful if you get them in smaller chunks, focusing on a few at a time. Today I will get “us” out of the way first, introducing people most involved in the organization and running of the event this year.
The two of us, Anton and I, have concieved and organized this meeting for five years now, and are both involved in a number of other local online and offline communications projects, including Scienceblogging.org, SCONC, Science In The Triangle, BlogTogether, Open Laboratory and more still to come.
Catharine Zivkovic is my wife, and thus has had a lot of influence on me and on the conference over the years. She is a registered Intensive Care nurse, a UNC student, a bioethicist and a writer. She also tweets.
Karyn Traphagen has taught or is teaching a wide variety of things that only at first sight do not seem related: physics, violin, biblical Hebrew and art. She is an online adjunct faculty at University of Virginia (physics), and a PhD student at the University of Stellenbosch. She volunteers at the NC Museum of Life & Science in Durham. She blogs at Boulders 2 Bits and tweets. This year, Karyn is helping us organize volunteers and is in charge of the swag and the Book Fair.
Nancy Shepherd is the founder and CEO of Shepherd Research. She is also on Twitter. As she did masterfully last year, Nancy is in charge of organizing the Lab and Museum Tours this year as well.
The deadline is November 30th, 2011 at midnight (Pacific time) so you have about one and a half days to dig through your (or other people’s) blog archives including all the way back to December 1st 2009 and pick your best essays, stories, poems, comic strips, cartoons and original art you produced since then.
Under the fold are entries so far. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries Continue reading →
ScienceOnline2011 in the final stretch of organization, Open Laboratory in the final stretch of submissions, four SciAm guest-blog posts lined up for this week, a Q&A to respond to, ‘Encephalon’ to prepare for tomorrow at noon, lots of e-mails to answer….let’s say that this was a busy Sunday. Continue reading →
Posted onNovember 28, 2010byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on It’s getting hot – submissions for Open Laboratory 2011 are flying in by the dozens per hour… how about you?
The deadline is November 30th, 2011 at midnight (Pacific time) so you have about two and a half days to dig through your (or other people’s) blog archives including all the way back to December 1st 2009 and pick your best essays, stories, poems, comic strips, cartoons and original art you produced since then.
Under the fold are entries so far. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries Continue reading →
Took a couple of days off, relaxing. After the magnificent Heritage Turkey meal on Thursday at the Zuiker’s house, we had lunch at Neil’s Deli in Carrboro yesterday and at Weaver Street Market in Carrboro today. Yesterday we saw “Inside Job” about the way sociopaths in the financial industry systematically screwed up the national and world economies over the past 30 years. Today we saw “Fair Game” about the way sociopaths in the government act when exposed to be liars – the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame outing episode. Don’t believe me they are sociopaths? Watch both movies – they are excellent.
It is getting really close! Yes, we have more than 700 entries….but are yours among them? This will all close in three days, at midnight (OK, Pacific Time, so three extra hours) November 30th, so hurry up!
Don’t forget that along with essays and stories, we are also looking for other stuff, so if you have a poem, a cartoon/comic strip or original art, we’d like to see that as well.
Jason and the judges are ready!
The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries Continue reading →
You may not see it very easily, but there is a lot of work behind the scenes making sure that ScienceOnline2011, our fifth meeting, will be bigger and better than ever.
Yesterday was the day for giving Thanks. Today is the day for Listening.
Last night, we had the most wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Anton and his lovely family. Today, we should all sit down with someone and listen to their story. Perhaps write it down or record it for posterity.
So today, I would like to re-listen to my Mother’s story. For those of you who may have missed it the first time around, here it is, in five parts:
Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders, nutrition scientists and bloggers you know from the Obesity Panacea blog, have a new endeavor – Science of Blogging
Science of Blogging will not only highlight the ways by which social media is changing the way science and research is communicated, but also provide basic suggestions for individuals or organizations who seek to use social media to increase the public understanding of scientific research.
We hope to achieve this goal by picking the brains of members of the online science community via regular guest posts, discussions, interviews, podcasts and more. We want to bring together our combined knowledge and experience to make it easier for people to start discussing science online (via any social media channels), or to do so more effectively.
I skipped a day – so you get twice as many links today, but it is a holiday so you have plenty of time and there is some great stuff there: Continue reading →
There is only a week left for submissions! Dig through your archives, through other people’s archives and submit! Jason has started to contact potential judges for this year’s anthology. We’re ready to roll!
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries
The list is growing fast – check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own – an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.
The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
UPDATE: I have greatly expanded on this post in this article written about a month later.
============
Last night on Twitter I asked:
OK, who were the best bloggers and Twitterers from before the WWW, perhaps before the 20th century? Letter writers, pamphleteers, diarists – who of old would have been a Natural Born Blogger?
This is what people came up with in responses:
Samuel Pepys (yes, click on it, it’s a blog, also on Twitter)
George Orwell (yes, see his blog)
Darwin (here, on Twitter),
Aldous Huxley (on Twitter)
Richard_Owen (on Twitter)
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
James Boswell,
Nellie Bly
H.L.Mencken
Leonardo da Vinci
Ezra the Prophet
David Hume
Alexander von Humboldt,
Aldo Leopold,
Walt Whitman
Socrates,
Plato,
Aristotle
Galileo
St John
Michael Faraday
Nietzsche
Ben Franklin (That would practically be Boing Boing)
Jesus’ apostles
Maimonides
Confucious
Einstein and Freud wrote some interesting letters back and forth that were published at some point.
Virginia Woolf,
Samuel Johnson,
Emerson,
Graham Greene
Robert Scott,
Admunsen,
Joseph Banks
Anne Frank
Jane Austen
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Montaigne
Walter Cronkite
Joseph Priestley
H.P. Lovecraft (who wrote more correspondence + commentary than he did fiction)
Albert Camus,
all the great war correspondents were proto-bloggers, Various diarists
Also all of these guys (watch the animation, play with parameters):
Letters and diaries were meant to be public, shared, read, saved, then published (at least posthumously). Just like blogs, tweets and Facebook today….
Many wrote letters in duplicate: one copy to send, one to keep for publishing Collected Letters later in life. Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read).
I bet a lot of ship captains’ logs were essentially tweets, right? With geolocation apps (RT @Cdarwin Just became mayor of HMS Beagle). And those are still very useful today.
Nothing new under the Sun. Apart from technology (software instead of writing/printing on paper), speed (microseconds instead of days and weeks by stagecoach, railroad or Pony Express, see image on the left) and number of people reached (potentially millions simultaneously instead of one person or small group at a time), blogging is nothing new – this is how people have always communicated.
It is the broadcast media, a few large corporations employing professional writers informing millions – with no ability for the receivers of information to fact-check, talk back, ask questions, be a part of the conversation – that is an exception in history, for just a few decades of the 20th century.
It took 150-250 years or so between the invention of printing press by Gutenberg until we get to the first examples of something similar to the 20th century system of communication. London Gazette of 1666 is usually thought to be the very first newspaper. First English-language scientific journal was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665.
But until the 20th century we did not see the consolidation of media into large conglomerates, and of course there were no radio or TV until mid-20th century. Not until later did we see the monopolization of local media markets by a single newspaper which, then, had to serve everyone, so had to invent the fake “objective” HeSaidSheSaid timid style of reporting in order not to lose customers and thus advertising revenue.
All we are doing now is returning to (old but important link to revisit) a more natural, straightforward and honest way of sharing information, but using much more efficient ways of doing it. And not even that – where technology is scarce, the analog blogging is live and well.
What about trustworthiness of all that online stuff? Some is and some isn’t to be trusted. It’s up to you to figure out your own filters and criteria, look for additional sources.
But that is not new, either. The only thing that was really wrong is the way so many people unquestioningly accepted what 20th-century style broadcast media served them. Just because articles were under the banners of big companies did not make them any more trustworthy by definition. In the 20th century we lost the ability to read everything critically, awed by the big names like NYT and BBC and CNN.
With the return of a more natural system of communication, we got to see additional opinions, fact-checks on the media by experts on the topic, and realized that the mainstream media is not to be trusted. With the return of a more natural system of communication, we will all have to re-learn how to read critically, find second opinions, evaluate sources. Nothing new there either – that is what people have been doing for millennia – the 20th century is the exception.
Yes, two posts on the Guest Blog today, nicely fitting together.
In the first post, Forgotten Dreams? posted last night, Lawrence Krauss wonders poetically about the beauty of understanding the natural world, and how supernatural explanations are impoverished in comparison.
In the second post, Divine intervention via a microbe posted this morning, James Byrne provides one just such example – the scientific explanation for a strange natural phenomenon is much, much more interesting, complex, weird and beautiful than the simplistic divine interpretation.
Go read them both and comment (registration is super-simple: name, e-mail, click)
Hi all. Normally we aim to hold pizza lunch on the 3rd Tuesday of each month. In November, that date conflicts with the ship date of the January-February 2011 issue of American Scientist. So we’ll convene a week later. Still, I think you’ll find the session—something different this time—worth the wait.
Join us on Tuesday, Nov. 23 to hear one of our own, veteran science blogger Bora Zivkovic, talk about the shifting ecosystems within his craft. Zivkovic has had a front seat to much of that change, as author of the influential A Blog Around The Clock, as co-founder (with Anton Zuiker) of the international conference ScienceOnline in RTP, as the former online community manager at Public Library of Science and, now, as the new blog and community editor for Scientific American magazine. For a long time, people spoke of the day when print and online media would converge. In a growing share of the publishing world, that convergence has occurred. And Bora, when it comes to science journalism, has been a catalyst in that change.
Thanks to a grant from the N.C. Biotechnology Center, American Scientist Pizza Lunch is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of all stripes. Feel free to forward this message to anyone who might want to attend. RSVPs are required (for the slice count) to cclabby@amsci.org
Do you want to make a contribution to science? Citizen Science is one of our Change the Equation projects as part of the White House’s Educate to Innovate efforts to boost teaching in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We plan a platform on our site and apps, allowing people to participate in ongoing scientific research.
There are only tho weeks left for submission! Dig through your archives, through other people’s archives and submit! Jason has started to contact potential judges for this year’s anthology. We’re ready to roll!
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries
The list is growing fast – check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own – an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.
The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
ScienceOnline2011 is starting exactly two months from now. There is still a lot of work to do, but Anton and I have a lot of help from the community – from people online who crowdsource things that need to be done, to local volunteers who are helping with various aspects of organization. The fifth conference promises to be bigger and better than ever.
You want to see the excitement? Just check the Twitter use of the hashtag #scio11 (also on Twapperkeeper which is missing automated RTs and @replies and tweets by private accounts but is already registering 2427 tweets!). Subscribe to the official @scio11 account (as well as @scienceblogging – both will have multiple users during the conference itself) and follow the Twitter List of all #scio11 attendees.
Everything online, including blog posts, that has the hashtag #scio11 in it, is now also aggregated on Scienceblogging.org (scroll down), so please tag your posts accordingly, or place them directly on Delicious.
If you have pictures on Flickr that are in any way related to science blogging, please add tag #scienceblogging and later, once the conference starts, ALSO the tag #scio11. Both will also be displayed on Scienceblogging.org.
Your starting point for the conference is, of course, the homepage where the key links and information are displayed up front. The homepage also contains the official scio11 blog with news and updates. During the conference itself, this is where we will have a number of attendees post their coverage of individual sessions.
The most important part of the site is the planning wiki so you should familiarize yourself with it. If you are registered to attend the conference, you should probably also register as a wiki user for ease of use, and if you are watching from afar you can still edit as “guest”.
What kind of information can you find on the wiki?
There is a list of all the participants’ blogs and homepages (if you are one of them, feel free to edit, add additional URLs etc.) as well as a blogroll of science/nature/medicine blogs located in North Carolina (if you have one and it is not listed, let me know or just add it to the page).
The Program Suggestions page was used for a few months now by a number of people volunteering to moderate sessions, etc. This has now starting to crystallize into a more definitive version of the program on the Program Finalization page (edited by moderators and panelists, as well as myself). In a couple of days, we will have a final program and it will be posted on the Program page (to be edited only by me).
There is a new post on the SciAm Guest Blog this morning. It is by Steven Wartik, asking if computer science is a science or nor or what – I’m Not a Real Scientist, And That’s Okay. Go check it out and post comments. Share with your computer scientist friends 😉
Well, registration for ScienceOnline2011 filled up in 45 minutes. Now the details need to be all hammered – Program is almost ready and we are adding information to the wiki as it becomes available. Until then, read these:
Update: Registration has filled up in 45 minutes. You can add yourself to the waitlist.
Registration for ScienceOnline2011, the fifth annual conference on the intersection between science and the Web, is now open.
With only 300 seats, and so many people interested, I am sure registration will fill out in minutes! So hurry up and register right now then come back here afterwards….
You can follow the discussions on Twitter, blogs, Flickr, Facebook, etc. by searching for the #scio11 hashtag in all those places. Please use that hashtag wherever you mention the meeting.
We will try to have all the sessions livestreamed on Ustream. Keep an eye on the website for updates.
After 6 planes, 2 trains, 6 NYC Metro trains, three cabs and one bus, I am finally back from the whirlwind tour of Greenville, South Carolina (for the The 2010 Conference on Communicating Science), New York City (a few hours each on Friday and Monday at the SciAm office) and New Haven, CT (for the ScienceWriters2010 NASW/CASW meeting). Nice to be home for a while!
ScienceWriters2010 was a fantastic experience – there were about 600 people there and I have met many people who I only knew online before (or even only from their bylines). I blogged and tweeted very little, as people who I hope are my audience were mostly there so I thought it would be much nicer to just talk kface-to-face for a change. But other people did much more – check out #sciwri10 hashtag on Twitter, and the official conference blog. Most NASW sessions were recorded so you can watch videos (including of my panel – Rebooting the News) and slide-casts of them here.
The Scientific American Guest Blog is busy – today saw a new post by JenniferJacquet – Ecologists: Wading from nature to networks. More to come tomorrow, and pretty much every work-day between now and ScienceOnline2011 (and probably beyond). Pitch me a topic for a guest-post if interested at Bora@sciam.com.
Tomorrow will be a busy day – trying to turn this busy page into an actual ScienceOnline2011 program, so we can open for registration on Wednesday at 12noon EST.
Also, don’t forget to submit your (and other people’s) blog posts (essays, stories, art, poetry, cartoons, comic strips, etc) for the Open Laboratory anthology as there are only three weeks left.
There is only Three weeks left for submissions! Dig through your archives, through other people’s archives and submit! Jason has started to contact potential judges for this year’s anthology. We’re ready to roll!
Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail me the corrected URLs for your entries
The list is growing fast – check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own – an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.
The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. Continue reading →
Posted onNovember 5, 2010byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on The latest post on the Scientific American Guest Blog: To Catch a Fallen Sea Angel: a mighty mollusk detects ocean acidification
And if you did not do it yet, you have the entire weekend to catch up with our (now daily) serving of sciency bloggy goodness on the Guest Blog – six posts this week already:
Just came back from The 2010 Conference on Communicating Science in Greenville SC which was awesome. Getting up before dawn tomorrow to get myself first to NYC to SciAm offices, then to ScienceWriters2010 at Yale in New Haven CT. Here are some examles of good science writing for you:
A Blog Around The Clock 