Photo by k.tommy.The 32nd edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted right here at Denim and Tweed on the first of February! So you have until midnight, 31 January to send me your posts about evolution and all the grandeur in the evolutionary view of life. Use the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.
The Deep Sea News crew knows how to party. Photo by hanjeanwat.The science blogosphere was abuzz with ScienceOnline 2011 recaps, post mortems, and soul-seeking. The Columbia Journalism Review gave the conference a nice write-up. Dave Munger meditated on the line between jazzing up science and dumbing it down. Chris Rowan pointed out that no matter how well science blogging shapes its outreach, the broader media often fixes the game. Ed Yong worried that science blogging was “stuck in an echo chamber,” and Ryan Somma mapped it. Christie Wilcox tried out what she’d learned about online writing by murdering a darling. And Minority Postdoc started an inventory of diversity in the science blogosphere.
Meanwhile, in non-meta online science news:
And finally, here’s long-awaited video of Robert Krulwich’s inspiring ScienceOnline keynote address. Part two, and more, is at A Blog Around the Clock.
At ScienceOnline, even the coffee break is nerdy. Photo by Ryan Somma.So now I’m back in Moscow, mostly recovered from ScienceOnline 2011. I’ve almost finished the copy of Holly Tucker’s cracking good book Blood Work that came in my swag bag. (Cross-country flights are great for reading.) I’m breaking in my new “How to Explain Your Research at a Party” t-shirt from AAAS, and I’ve finished a conference weekend’s worth of laundry. I even got to resume my workout schedule with an outdoor run, because all of a sudden northern Idaho is as balmy as North Carolina. And I’m able to think about the conference a little more reflectively than I did in my previous posts.
One of the highlights of the conference that’s still sticking with me is the “How to Explain Science in Blog Posts” session, which broke the audience into small groups to discuss different aspects of science blogging. I made a beeline for the “writing” group, since that’s been on my mind lately. The group moderators, Ed Yong and Christie Wilcox, led a great discussion on tone and the use of metaphor, and even shaded into the writing process. None other than Bora Zivkovic related how he’ll have his wife edit particularly important posts.
As I said in my earlier brief wrap-up, the whole session reminded me of my undergrad creative writing class, and in a good way. But we didn’t really have time for specific examples, and could barely scratch the surface of the process from finding a subject to writing it up and presenting it.
It occurred to me (about two miles into the aforementioned run) that I’d really enjoy a workshop that took participants through that entire process for a single post. I’m imagining it’d have to be at least two sessions: one discussing how to come up with topics, another for the writing process, and maybe a third for presentation with images, layout, et cetera. It’d be especially cool to have participants actually develop a single post through the course of the different sessions, and do some peer editing at one or more stages.
Is it too early to start proposing sessions for ScienceOnline 2012?
Photo by mrjojo.The 32nd edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted right here at Denim and Tweed on the first of February! So you have until midnight, 31 January to submit your posts about evolutionary biology and all its myriad cultural, political, and historical ramifications on the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.
In session at ScienceOnline 2011. More photos are in the ScienceOnline 2011 Flickr group. Photo by cephalopodcast.Saturday at ScienceOnline 2011 was the meat of the conference, a full day of moderated discussion sessions at the Sigma Xi building. Video of many sessions was webcast live, and will later be archived online, courtesy of the National Association of Science Writers. Highlights from the ones I attended:
In data discoverability, Kiyomi Deards, Molly Keener, and Steve Koch covered the logistics of open notebook science from making published papers freely available online to opening up datasets as they’re collected. There wasn’t discussion about the point at which scientific results ought to be freely available outside the lab—I’m all for making my papers and the final data underlying them open access, but I don’t necessarily want to post my working notebooks.
In the first line of response, the crew of Deep Sea News and John Amos of the organization SkyTruth discussed how online coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill this spring helped to counter frequently inaccurate official stories, and how they could maintain public awareness in the aftermath. It was the only session I attended that performed a formal post mortem on one of the biggest events for online science writing in the last year, and it had some useful insight for covering and responding to future disasters.
How to explain science in blog posts was the closest I’ve come to a writing workshop since undergrad. A long list of top-notch bloggers and writers (Scicurious, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna, Vivienne Raper, Eric Michael Johnson, Brian Mossop, Carin Bondar, Melody Dye, Christie Wilcox, and Ed Yong) split the attendees into groups to discuss content choices, the writing process, blog design, and how best to promote work online.
After the sessions, Saturday’s activities concluded with a banquet that shaded smoothly into drinks at the hotel bar, and then more drinks in the suite rented by a couple members of The Gam. I called it a night at about 2 a.m. Now I’m leaning heavily on the free coffee in this morning’s final sessions about blogging in academia and the purpose of public science outreach.
It’s been a great weekend. Unlike most academic conferences, ScienceOnline is an opportunity to talk with scientists outside my immediate field and, maybe more importantly, a lot of non-scientists. It’s been good to see a bunch of folks I met last yearagain, and to meet more folks I’ve previously known only as Twitter avatars and/or fantastic online writers, especially Dr. Skyskull/Greg Gbur, Dr. Freeride/Janet Stemwedel, Eric Michael Johnson, Holly Bik, and Steve Silberman.
Apologies if I’ve missed anyone, but there was quite a bit of booze involved.
In the Duke University research forest, towers like these dosed experimental plots with carbon dioxide to simulate the effects of climate change. Photo by jby.I arrived last evening at ScienceOnline 2011 barely coherent after thirteen hours of travel from Moscow, Idaho (2 a.m. Pacific time) to Durham, North Carolina (about 6 p.m. Eastern time). Robert Krulwich’s keynote address woke me back up. Krulwich explained his approach to science journalism and illustrated it with clips from his work, including the transcendently good Radiolab. How do you get your audience excited about science, according to Krulwich? Talk about what excites you, and lead them to discover it with you.
I spent this morning touring the Duke University research forest outside Durham, where scientists from Duke and many other institutions are conduction some amazingly ambitious ecological experiments. Biogeochemist Ben Coleman presented studies of nanoparticle movement through terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems using mesocosms—semi-contained natural communities.
View inside an experimental warming plot. Photo by jby.Carl Salk, a Ph.D. candidate in biology, walked us through plots that are being heated to simulate a changed climate. The plots are enclosed on four sides by plastic, with warm air pumped in via ductwork and electric lines warming the soil to bring them up to 3 or 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the outside. It doesn’t sound like much, but it makes a difference. Salk says plants in the warmed plots are developing leaves days and, in some cases, weeks earlier in the spring than plants in control plots.
The final stop was the biggest experimental setup, Duke’s Free Atmospheric Carbon Enrichment site, which has been testing how forests will grow in an atmosphere containing more carbon dioxide by pumping more carbon dioxide into forest plots. This is achieved with rings of towers like the ones pictured at the top of this post spraying carbon dioxide into experimental plots. The gas is reclaimed from fertilizer production, and into the air anyway; the experiment simply boosts it locally. The sheer volume of research done within these plots is amazing, but the site is now shutting down after 15 years.
The tour was over by noon, and the afternoon devoted to workshops. I attended a talk on how to develop course websites—with forums and online quizzes and integrated chat!—using Drupal, and another on the logistics of moving between blogging platforms. Once I’m done with this post, it’s off to a book-themed happy hour and dinner in Durham. Until tomorrow, here’s a slideshow of the other photos I’ve taken so far:
Photo by foshydog.As this post goes live, I’ll be waking up for the first full day of Science Online 2011, for which I expect to do a lot of blog coverage. So I’m just listing a handful of links this week:
And here’s a ScienceOnline-appropriate video, produced on behalf of NASA because “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks.”
More specifically, my post about J.B.S. Hadane’s involvement in a Soviet propaganda film featuring the revival of a severed head will be included in the Open Lab 2010 anthology of online science writing. It’s a huge honor to be chosen alongside such an incredible list of writers from such a long list of awesome submissions.
As one of forty volunteer reviewers, I know how stiff the competition was, and how hard the final decisions must have been. I only have an inkling, though, of the amazing effort editor Jason Goldman put in to sort through all the submissions, coordinate reviews, and develop a final list.
The cover design for the final print volume will apparently be unveiled at Science Online 2011 (which is next weekend!), and the book itself will be available for purchase once all the submissions are revised for dead-tree formatting.
Bumblebee. Photo by je-sa.
Photo by kelseyxsunshine.The 31st edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online at The Dispersal of Darwin—it went up at midnight, New Year’s Day, if I’m not mistaken. In spite of the holiday season, the post list is pretty overwhelming—contributions include Jerry Coyne on reinforcement, John Hawks on the new proto-human genome, Brian Switek on fossils that contributed to evolutionary theory, and Krystal D’Costa on the evolution of gestures for communication.
Check’em out, and tune in next month, when CoE number 32 will be hosted … right here! Submit your posts about evolutionary biology and all its myriad cultural and historical ramifications on the CoE blog carnival form, or e-mail links to denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com.