Tag Archives: blogging

Science online, independently-evolved sonar edition

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Photos by Thomas Hawk and Tolka Rover.

Whether you’re doing it underwater or in the air, echolocation apparently requires the same kind of adaptation. New Scientist reports that parallel evolutionary changes to the same gene allow both dolphins and bats to hear the high-frequency sounds they use for sonar. In other online science news:

Science online, share and share alike edition

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Wednesday saw Greta and Dave Munger turn off the virtual lights at Cognitive Daily after five years of high-quality, and often participatory, science writing. No other science blog that I know regularly asked its readers to join studies, however informal, of the very concepts it covered – not just writing about science, but practicing it. It’s sad to see it end, but I’m looking forward to the new project Dave teases at the end of the announcement. Elsewhere in the science blogosphere:


Photo by Gary Simmons.
  • Europe’s fisheries aren’t likely to recover by 2015, as planned under a 2002 treaty. (Conservation Bytes)
  • The American Naturalist will begin requiring authors to deposit all data, not just genetic sequences or phylogenetic trees, in publicly-accessible online repositories. (skeetersays)
  • Shorebirds may migrate in part because there are fewer nest predators at higher latitudes. (Living the Scientific Life)
  • Natural selection imposed on native species by invasive species might make prairie grass communities better able to resist new invasions. (Conservation Maven)
  • Lemurs might have colonized Madagascar by rafting on driftwood – a new model of ocean currents shows that it might have been easier than previously thought. (Laelaps)

Blogging the white sands

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While out of town for Science Online, I got word of a new blog worth following – two other University of Idaho doctoral students, Simone DesRoches and Kayla Hardwick, have started writing about a self-directed course they’ve set up at The Evolutionary Ecology of White Sands, NM.

Simone and Kayla will be reading three classic evolutionary ecology texts, Dolph Schluter’s Ecology of Adaptive Radiation, Jerry Coyne and Alan Orr’s Speciation, and Robert MacArthur’s Geographical Ecology, and discussing them in the context of their research on the lizards of White Sands, New Mexico. Three distantly related species have all evolved white coloration after colonizing a region of white gypsum sands, each via a different genetic mechanism. (For more details, see Ed Yong’s excellent recent article about the White Sands lizards.) It’s a fascinating system, and the three books should make a great jumping-off point for discussing what’s known about it and what’s yet to be learned.


The white sands. Photo by Fabian A.M.

Research Blogging Awards 2010

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Research Blogging Awards 2010On the heels of Science Online 2010, the ResearchBlogging.org community has announced the Research Blogging Awards, honoring online writing about peer reviewed research in a wide range of categories. Nominations are open until 11 February, and can be submitted by anyone; a panel of judges will select 5 to 10 finalists from nominees in each category, and winners will be selected by a vote of the RB.org membership.

#scio10 day three: In which the discussion of online civility remains (almost) entirely civil

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Sunday morning, the final sessions of Science Online 2010 seemed almost planned to tie together the broad theme of the conference – how best to connect science (and working scientists) with the rest of society.

Broader impact done right: A heavily marine-themed panel – Karen James of the Beagle Project, Deep Sea blogger Kevin Zelnio, Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster’s Garter, the New England Aquarium’s Jeff Ives and NASA’s Beth Beck – discussed a wide range of science outreach options available, mostly from the perspective of working scientists.

A consensus emerged that good outreach, of which online resources are now usually a part, is essential to basic research, and will be increasingly important in obtaining funding. Funnily enough, my collaborator Chris Smith had just e-mailed me about the possibility of bringing a satellite broadband connection with us for the upcoming field season – maybe we’ll be live-blogging Joshua tree research this year.

Article-level metrics: Peter Binfield, the managing editor of PLoS ONE, discussed the ways in which PLoS is now measuring the impact of individual articles published through its online, open-access journals – not just citation counts, but also pageviews, PDF download rates, and the recent collaboration with ResearchBlogging.org to track blog coverage. It’s clear that research articles aren’t going to be judged by the impact factor of their containing journals anymore, now that you get a citation count with every Google Scholar search, and it’ll be interesting to see what scheme emerges as global standard for article-level impact.

Online civility: Science bloggers Janet “Dr. Freeride” Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and the pseudonomous Dr. Isis led discussion about what constitutes civil behavior in an online setting – and the conversation turned into something of an object lesson, as disagreement over the meaning of civility itself turned, well, very nearly un-civil. The panel did, I thought, an admirable job demonstrating in “real life” the skills necessary for online moderation of touchy discussions.

I wouldn’t say there was consensus, but the room did seem to come together around the ideas that communities define their own standards of civility, that those very standards can make it difficult to express minority or dissenting points of view, and that (judicious) incivility can be useful for minorities trying to be heard. Dave Munger made that last point, and I hope my paraphrase does it justice – I think it’s an important one. Certainly it’s the case that sexual minorities have been (and still are – I’m looking at you, Mennonite Church USA) told that merely acknowledging our existence and discussing our perspective is a violation of civility, inasmuch as “civil” is equivalent to “suitable for general audiences.” It was a great discussion, and I’m still processing it – it might be worth a dedicated post in the near future.

So now I’m sitting in the Raleigh-Durham airport, writing up the weekend over dodgy, overpriced WiFi – I’ve been badly spoiled by SignalShare’s fantastic service. Many, many thanks to organizers Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, and to the sponsors, who put on a fantastic conference – and especially to NESCent, who made it possible for me to attend. It was a great time!

#scio10 day two: In which the discussion turns to duck genitalia within the second session

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Science Online is not like the Evolution meetings. This was evident in the first session I entered, where the plastic click of laptop keys underlay the conversation between the panelists and the audience. Twitter was a second venue for discussion the whole conference, and you could track audience interest in a given session purely from posts with the #scio10 hashtag. Notes on the sessions I attended:

  • From blog to book: Tom Levenson, Brian Switek, and Rebecca Skloot discussed the usefulness of blogging for authors and developing authors, mostly as a venue for promoting books, but also as a space for developing ideas and writing to develop a book.
  • Rebooting science journalism: Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and David Dobbs led discussion about the future of science journalism online, with emphasis on unique ways to connect the diverse and Balkanized interest groups of the web to science news, and an extensive aside on the recently discovered role of sexual selection in the morphology of ducks’ penises and vaginas – Carl wasn’t able to publish much detail via a print magazine, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) the story proved popular online. This set off a flurry of interest in the article in question, and revealed I’m not the only one who thought this phenomenon makes limerick fodder.
  • Demonstrations of a new German science magazine for children, an online hub for New Zealand-centric science reporting, use of Second Life as a science education resource, and the Open Dinosaur Project. I wasn’t strongly impressed by the Second Life presentation – I don’t see the usefulness of the 3-d environment over conventional instant messaging. On the other hand, Andy Farke’s Open Dinosaur Project is doing amazing things with a bunch of volunteer “citizen scientists” assembling a morphological data from the literature. It’s a new model for digging data out of old publications, and it’s not hard to think of other projects that could benefit from a similar approach.
  • An open history of science: John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson discussed the history of media employed in scientific societies. Turns out that Enlightenment-era scientists corresponding by mail, the informal science societies they formed, and the journals they compiled from each others’ letters were more like the modern blogosphere than you might think.
  • Online reference managers: representatives from Citeulike, Mendeley, Zotero, and Scopus talked about their various products’ approaches to organize researchers’ electronic reference libraries, and to use personal contacts and library content to recommend new material. There’s some interesting possibilities – enough that I’ve downloaded Mendeley (the only one, so far as I could tell, that has a locally-installed client) to play around with for a bit. I’d love to ditch EndNote, if I can extract my thousands of references and linked files without too much bother.

The day concluded with a banquet at the hotel, capped by a series of brief “ignite” talks on everything from the benefits of blogging while working toward tenure to a crowd-sourced project to check the accuracy of chemistry information in online sources.

Here’s a slideshow of photos uploaded to Flickr with the #scio10 tag, mostly from Saturday if I’m not mistaken.

Science online, fried couch potato edition

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Photo by Kevin Steele.

Yes, I’m presently at Science Online 2010, but there’s no rest for the Interwebs.

  • Kill your TV, before it kills you: Watching more than an hour of television a day may counteract the benefits of regular exercise. (Dave Munger at SEED)
  • Divorce rates are higher in states with same-sex marriage bans. Correlation, or causation? “It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples.” (FiveThirtyEight.com)
  • Artificial selection of food plants doesn’t reduce their genetic diversity, it turns out. (Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog)
  • Prairie dogs help prevent invasive plants from invading. (Conservation Magazine)
  • Circumcision changes the bacterial community of the penis – and reduces the presence of species that can cause bacterial vaginosis. (Mike the Mad Biologist)
  • The evolution of avian influenza depends more on local dynamics than on long-distance migration events. (Mystery Rays from Outer Space)
  • Farmed salmon released in Scotland swim for Norway. (Conservation Maven)
  • In Fiji, tilapia escaped from fish farms are probably preying on native fish. (Observations of a Nerd)

And, finally, via kottke, beautiful footage paired with unsettling statistics.

On paywalls

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Via the Daily Dish: the Economist thinks 2010 will be the year that online newspapers and magazines start erecting paywalls between their content and the rest of the web. Sullivan doesn’t buy it (no pun intended):

Paywalls kill off critical interaction with the wider blogosphere and reduce readership drastically. I can see why media moguls might want the paywalls as some kind of replacement for all the power and money they have lost over the last decade. But I fear that the moment has passed.

But it occurs to me that, as someone who routinely blogs about science, I’m actually already working the way that more general news sites like the Dish might in a paywall-heavy environment – I frequently link to pages that contain only an abstract of the source article and a link via which you can pay some ridiculous figure for one-time access. The scientific journals to which I link are far more expensive than the New York Times will ever be. Yet I, and a lot of much more successful science-focused bloggers, are doing OK, and people are learning about new scientific results through our (mostly their) writing, probably mostly without ever clicking through for the original articles. That wouldn’t work for the New York Times.

So why does it (kinda, sorta) work for scientific journals? (1) Maybe most of my readers are academics, with institutional subscriptions to carry them past those links with the [$a] tags. (2) Maybe those of my readers who don’t have institutional subscriptions don’t count as lost revenue for the journals, because they’re people who would never buy a copy of Systematic Biology on a newsstand if they could. (3) There’s PLoS, and open-access has lots of promise as a model – maybe they’ll start to win out as blog coverage becomes more important as an impact metric?

Science online, stuck in the Felsenstein Zone edition

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Gray crowned rosy-finch. Photo by jroldenettel.
  • Bayesian methods for reconstructing evolutionary relationships between species may be susceptible to errors created by long branch attraction – one of the problems they were supposed to solve. (dechronization)
  • When introduced trout compete for food with gray-crowned rosy-finches, the rosyfinches lose. (Conservation Maven)
  • The success of an invasive plant depends on the kind of habitat it’s invading, and how that habitat is managed by humans. (The EEB & flow)
  • New fossils are the earliest-known vertebrate footprints on land – 395 million years old. (Not Exactly Rocket Science, Laelaps, Pharyngula, and Palaeoblog)
  • Give a meteorologist a green screen, and he’ll tell you tomorrow’s forecast. Give a meteorologist professional certification, and he’ll tell you that climate change is a hoax. (Columbia Journalism Review)

State of the blog, 2009

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I really started taking this blogging thing seriously about mid-way through 2008, when I became a member of Research Blogging. But 2009 is the first entire year I’ve spent actually thinking about what I’d like to write about on here, what place blogging occupies in the hierarchy of my to-do list, and what the point of the whole operation might be. So the end of the year (or really, till I finish this post, the beginning of 2010) seems like a good moment to pause and take inventory. Plus, it’ll give me a page to link to for some vital stats I’d like to read into the record.


Weekly visitors to D&T, tabulated by Google Analytics. Blue line: total visitors. Orange line: visitors referred via links from other sites.
  • In 2009, I wrote 229 posts (averaging just over 19/month), which drew 14,045 unique visitors (averaging 1,170/month) as tabulated by Google Analytics.
  • Most visitors who didn’t come directly to D&T linked here via Research Blogging or its widget on ScienceBlogs.com. I wrote 62 posts on peer-reviewed research for the Research Blogging aggregator, and these received 1,989 visitors via RB or SB. Other major referral sources include the Evolution 2009 blog coverage page (1,081 visitors) and the blogroll over at The EEB & Flow (1,027 visitors).
  • I also joined the Nature Blog Network this year. NBN has been less a source of traffic, and more useful for its reminders about upcoming blog carnivals and suggestions for casual bloggers.
  • I covered the Darwin 200 festivities leading up to, and throughout, the week of 12 February.
  • I also blogged about the Evolution 2009 meetings, which were hosted by my department at the University of Idaho. I ran the conference website, and attempted to coordinate online activities to coincide with the meatspace meeting, with mixed success.
  • This was also a year of political furor, in the States if not elsewhere, and I wrote 34 posts tagged “politics”. I did not apply that label to my brief note on Barack Obama’s inauguration as President.
  • I’ve continued to write about Christianity on D&T, but only composed 13 posts with that tag, and only 2 posts about Mennonites specifically. This reflects, I think, my present relationship to the tradition in which I was raised. I don’t subscribe to the supernatural elements of orthodox Christian doctrine, and the Mennonite Church as an institution doesn’t seem interested in my company for, um, other reasons (although there are hopeful signs). Time for a change to the masthead? We’ll have to see.
  • I made $35.40 in commissions on those nerdy t-shirts of my own design advertised in the sidebar. I will not be quitting my day job any time soon.
  • As an extremely pleasant end-of-year surprise, I was also awarded a travel grant for the Science Online 2010 conference, in recognition of a particularly involved post I wrote back in August about the evolution of milk drinking by adult humans. I’m looking forward to the conference and shall, naturally, cover it here.

Which observation brings this post to a tidy narrative end. I remain, I think, a scientist who has a blog rather than a science blogger, though the line between the two is blurry. Like any single-author publication, D&T is a horribly narcissistic enterprise – to me it’s serving a useful function if it provides regular writing practice, structure for my extracurricular science reading, and a place to blow off steam. I’ve been very fortunate this year to garner the occasional comment, some very kind in-person remarks from readers I’ve happened to meet in person, and an opportunity to start 2010 with a conference full of smart people who are way better at this sort of thing than I am ever likely to be. Not too bad, as hobbies go.