Category Archives: media

Blogging research

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ResearchBlogging.orgWondering what’s with these check-mark icons that have started popping up on my posts? They’re part of my new membership in the Research Blogging community, which aggregates ‘blog posts about peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Members use the Research Blogging online tool to create citations for papers they’re blogging about, and they copy the citation code into the relevant post to create a stylish reference list. The citation code includes tags that are picked up by Research Blogging’s web crawler, which then links the page containing the citation to Research Blogging’s relevant topic pages (such as biology) and RSS feed. Posts that I submit to Research Blogging will also be marked with the aggregator’s icon, so someone arriving directly at Denim & Tweed can quickly scan for posts about peer-reviewed papers. It’s a great way to find out what other science bloggers are reading, and it’s boosted my traffic to values that are statistically distinguishable from zero. If you like reading about science, or if you blog about it, Research Blogging is extremely useful.

Mennonite Weekly goes Web 2.0

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Mennonite Weekly Review, an independent publication covering the news of what a taxonomist might call the Mennonite community sensu lato (Mennonite Church USA, Old Order, Amish, Brethren, and other flavors of Anabaptists), has a slick new website. The overall setup is far easier to navigate than the old site, which was frankly painful to dig through, and articles now have comment forums attached. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this new site, and very probably making a donation.

Orwell’s diary as a ‘blog

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For about a week, now, I’ve been following a new release of George Orwell’s diary, in the form of a weblog, published exactly 70 years after the dates of the original entries. The contents are awfully appropriate for the format – brief, first-person notes on Orwell’s day-to-day life, with a surprising (to me) amount of emphasis on the developments in the natural world. As in the entry for 17 August, 1938:

Catmint, peppermint & tansies full out. Ragwort & willow-herb going to seed. A few ripe blackberries. Elder-berries beginning to turn purple.

Oak planks etc. made from the boughs instead of the trunk is known as bastard oak & is somewhat cheaper.

The presenters have added hyperlinks to specific useful information, like pages about the plant species mentioned above. And, as if it weren’t blog-like enough already, there are frequently clipped newspaper stories.

Gunman shoots eight, kills two at Unitarian church

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Yesterday, Jim D. Adkisson allegedly walked into a performance of a children’s musical at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and shot eight people, two of whom are now dead. Why?

According to a search warrant for Mr. Adkisson’s house filed by the police, during interrogation Mr. Adkisson admitted to the shooting and said “he had targeted the church because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”

Local news site Knoxnews.com says that police found books by Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity at Adkisson’s house. Of course, those authors right-wing nutjobs didn’t tell Adkisson to shoot Unitarians (at least, not having read their books or absorbed much of their radio and TV shows, I assume they didn’t) – they’ve only made their living comparing the political opposition to terrorists, despots, and the insane. They can’t be responsible for some crazy guy in Tennessee taking it all literally.

My self-righteous fulmination aside, I believe that the people of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church would appreciate your thoughts and prayers.

I have no idea what they’re talking about

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Today’s New York Times Books section has a hand-wringing piece about the effect of Internet use on reading habits. I think the main point is that reading online shortens and fragments your attention span, but I never did finish the piece because I got distracted reading a New Yorker article on medical marijuana and a Times Magazine piece about Afghanistan while I set up an analysis on the UI supercomputing cluster and checked Facebook. And blogged about it.

(Meanwhile, I’m almost finished with the third volume of Neal Stephenson’s excellent, and lengthy, Baroque cycle, printed on good old dead trees.)

I guess “wiki” sounded weird once, too

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Google has officially opened Knol, its answer to Wikipedia, for contributions from the general public. The principle innovation of Knol is that contributors will be encouraged to use their real identities, and primarily contribute on subjects within their own expertise. There are also apparently tools explicitly designed for collaboration.

Knol is still very much a work in progress: there are knols (= “units of knowledge,” natch) on “Leadership 101” and ganglion cysts and how to write a knol; but, as of right now, no hits on a search for “evolution,” “bicycle,” “Mennonite,” or even “plant.” Whereas Wikipedia certainly has extensive entries for each, probably including exhaustive lists of references to the terms in the films of Martin Scorsese.

For more, see the Official Google Blog and coverage by Wired.

Science 2.0 revisited

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Back in March, Science ran a Perspectives piece in which computer scientist Ben Shneiderman suggested that the wealth of new data on human interactions provided by the Internet (Facebook, Amazon.com customer records, &c.) would require a new approach to science, which he called “Science 2.0” [subscription]:

… the Science 2.0 challenges cannot be studied adequately in laboratory conditions because controlled experiments do not capture the rich context of Web 2.0 collaboration, where the interaction among variables undermines the validity of reductionist methods (7). Moreover, in Science 2.0 the mix of people and technology means that data must be collected in real settings … Amazon and Netflix became commercial successes in part because of their frequent evaluations of incremental changes to their Web site design as they monitored user activity and purchases.

Science 2.0 sounded, to me, a lot like what ecologists and evolutionary biologists often do – hypothesis testing based on observations, manipulations of whole natural systems in the field, and the clever use of “natural experiments” sensu Diamond [subscription]. I said as much in a post shortly after Shneiderman’s article ran, and also wrote a brief letter to Science.

And now it turns out they’ve published it! My letter, along with a response from Shneiderman, is in the 6 June issue [subscription]. You can read it in PDF format here. In very short form, I say:

… what Shneiderman calls Science 1.0 has always included methods beyond simple controlled experiments, such as inference from observation of integrated natural systems and the careful use of “natural experiments” (1) to test and eliminate competing hypotheses.

Shneiderman’s response concedes the point on natural experiments, but says he was actually talking about manipulative experiments conducted on large online social networks:

Amazon and NetFlix designers conduct many studies to improve their user interfaces by making changes in a fraction of accounts to measure how user behaviors change. Their goal is to improve business practices, but similar interventional studies on a massive scale could develop better understanding of human collaboration in the designed (as opposed to natural) world …

That still sounds to me like ecological experimentation, but with people’s Facebook accounts instead of (to pick an organism at random) yucca moths. Maybe I’m just not getting it, but I don’t see anything in Shneiderman’s description that qualifies as a new kind of science.

References
Shneiderman B. 2008. Science 2.0. Science 319:1349-50.

Diamond J. 2001. Dammed experiments! Science 294:1847-8.

Yoder, JB, and B Shneiderman. 2008. Science 2.0: Not So New? Science 320:1290-1.

Reading Left Behind with brain engaged

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Slacktivist is a lefty Christian blogger who, among other things, is reading Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s apocoly-porn Left Behind and posting periodical reactions. (Full disclosure: in high school, I worked at a Christian bookstore that did brisk trade in LB and its multifarious sequels, which approached the Second Coming like Achilles chasing the tortoise. I still feel kinda icky about that.) But back on topic, Slacktivist hits the nail on the head w/r/t LaHaye and Jenkins’s theology:

Their Antichrist is an anti-christ, an anti-messiah, in the sense that he is a false liberator who brings slavery. But where Carpathia chooses to pursue power, those who oppose him do the same. L&J’s version of the evil beast will be defeated, ultimately, not by the lamb, but by the good beast. In Left Behind, good triumphs over evil not because it is intrinsically different, but because it is simply more powerful. God has a bigger gun than the devil.

Needless to say, I’m going to have to keep following this one.