I am reliably informed that the monthly round-up of online writing about evolution is available now at DNA Barcoding. Reserve a nice long block of time to peruse the links—this month’s carnival is bigger on the inside.◼
Tag Archives: blogging
Science online, meddling Congresspeople and deceptive orchids edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I explain why I think we should study the evolution of human sexuality.
- And, at the Molecular Ecologist: I fret about Congressional interference in NSF’s grant review process.
- With an apperance by some guy with a really weird middle name. A nice extended meditation on the biological basis of sexual orientation.
- Something to keep in mind while teaching: It hurts to feel stupid.
- The solution for bad science: more science. How the emergence of evolutionary biology overturned a major “scientific” justification for slavery.
- Mr. President, we must not allow an implementation gap! Is there a gap between ecological theory and conservation practice?
- NSFW if you’re an orchid; just embarrassing if you’re a bee. How orchids trick bees into mating with them. With video!
- And it has
nothingeverything to do with the fact that she’s black. Sixteen-year-old girl faces felony charges for DIY chemistry experiment. See also, also, and also. If that sounds crazy to you, there is a petition you should sign. - Because, fitness. A nexus of recent human evolution might just be pregnancy.
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Science online, green-blooded rat ticklers edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Does science promote morality?
- And at The Molecular Ecologist: I demonstrate how to make species distribution models in R.
- Good luck! Physicians at the University of Minnesota are going to try to cure another patient of HIV infection using a bone marrow transplant.
- Best experimental treatment ever? Need to de-stress your rat? Try a daily tickle party.
- For a general audience—but most of this also applies for scientific ones. David Dobbs on how to write about science.
- “So, we have red blood because Nature started making O2 with chlorophyll.” The biochemistry of blood in science fiction movies.
- Definitely significant. Or trending that way, at least. A list of statistical weasel-words.
- “That was the only way we could get them to pay attention.” How a groundbreaking book about the AIDS crisis spread a lie about the diseases’ origins.
- Seriously, this is asinine. How not to treat your graduate students, episode 2,573.
- And they don’t look that much nifty-er. “Forests” planted on the terraced sides of skyscrapers cost a lot more than actual on-the-ground forests.
- Clever girls! Groupers use gestures to coordinate their collaborative hunts with moray eels.
- Or, Jeremy Fox aims for the head. A couple of new papers help to slay the zombie of the local-regional richness relationship.
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Some not entirely unsolicited advice for science blogging success (for a given value of “success”)
Recently I recieved a very nice e-mail asking for advice about blogging, and after I’d written up a response I realized I was most of the way to a blog post. So, waste not, want not. First, the original question, then my response, which I’ve edited to protect the innocent (i.e., not me), and also to turn up the snark a bit more than I care to in an actual personal interaction:
… as a highly successful blogger maintaining and contributing to multiple well-followed blogs, we were wondering if you had any tips for us on a. how to better promote our blog and b. get more people commenting?
First, let me take a moment to bask in the phrase “highly successful blogger,” which: hahahahaHaHA. John Scalzi is a highly successful blogger. When I can pull down pageviews within an order of magnitude of his, we’ll talk about “highly successful.” (I’m not bitter—John Scalzi is, objectively, at least that much more awesome than me. Seriously, did you read this short story he wrote on Twitter over the course of a flight last week?)
But more seriously: now that I’ve been writing online since midway through grad school (since, eek, 2006), there are some people who care what I have to say, and come by to read it; I’ve had some writers who I deeply, deeply respect say some nice things about some of my work; and I’ve even been asked to go to other online places to do the kinds of things I used to do entirely on my own site. And that does make me happy, and I consider it’s a pretty great outcome from just writing about whatever I wanted to here in my own little corner of the Internet.
But yeah, I do more than just the writing.
Getting people to notice your blog takes a certain mix of (usually metaphorical) jumping up and down and saying “hey, look at this thing I wrote” and also “hey, I like this thing you wrote”—and really, quite a bit more of the latter than the former. Which is to say social media is where it’s at, you probably don’t need me to tell you. Consider setting up a Facebook page and a dedicated Twitter feed for your blog. If you discuss peer-reviewed journal articles, you might also register with ScienceSeeker.org, which aggregates blog posts that do exactly that. These provide lots of ways to say, “hey, look at this thing I wrote.”
But, to make social networks work, you have to actually be social. Regularly putting up new original posts is a starting point, but it’s just as important to interact with sites that you consider (or want) to be your “peers.” Link to other people’s posts about papers you’re discussing; comment on their sites and include a link to your own work, if it’s appropriate. Tweet and re-tweet links to things other people have written that you like. Write posts that just round up links to other things you like. Write posts that respond, in depth, to things you’ve read at other sites.
Also, regardless of your audience, layout and formatting and illustration matter. The front page should be friendly to a new arrival—set it up so she doesn’t need to scroll through the entire text of each post to get to the next, and provide options to search the site or navigate the archives, browse a list of post topics, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Posts should be illustrated, whenever possible, to attract attention to the specific topics discussed. When you’re discussing scientific papers, you might use figures from the paper discussed, which is pretty clearly okay under U.S. copyright law, anyway, via the “fair use” doctrine, so long as you’re not making a profit off the posts involved. There are lots of Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr, most of which are free to use as long as you provide attribution to the source, with a link—though, again, these are often restricted to not-for-profit uses.
More generally: Decide what your goals are, in terms of audience and traffic, and think about how they align with what you’re interested in doing with your blog. In-depth technical discussion of scientific papers necessarily has a smaller audience than posts written with (maybe) less detail but more attention to broad implications.
In terms of the sites where I write regularly, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! has a potential audience of anyone interested in science, plus people who like snarky takedowns and scientific illustrations made of attractive, shirtless men. In comparison The Molecular Ecologist is pitched mostly at working biologists, the same folks who read the journal Molecular Ecology. Accordingly, NiB has (I would say) a bigger potential audience; though in practice The Molecular Ecologist attracts rather steadier traffic, especially to posts that provide useful technical information.
That’s more or less the whole of my advice. For the moment, anyway. Go forth, and write well in online venues!◼
Science online, two months to Snowbird edition
- This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! We’re looking ahead to the Evolution meetings.
- And, at ProfHacker: I review a book about teaching science.
- Maybe! Does your brain know whether you’re reading a piece of paper or a screen?
- Not that we couldn’t do a lot better. U.S. policies for reducing carbon pollution are a scattershot mess, but they seem to be working.
- No, really. Why we should treat science and math literatcy more like basketball.
- With a lot of money on the line. The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in a case that could decide whether it’s legal to patent a human gene.
- So to speak. Even when you have all your publication-ducks in a row, how do you decide which ducks go first?
- Yum! Scicurious review’s Mary Roach’s new book Gulp.
- In a lineage this young, are we surprised? Human origins are turning out to be more of a mosaic than a clean-cut family tree.
- No kidding. For more students to go into science careers, maybe there need to be more science careers?
- Well, Earth-scale-ish. Kepler space telescope finds evidence of not one but two Earth-scale planets orbiting in another star’s “habitable zone.”
- More on E.O. Wilson vs. math. Maybe what he really doesn’t understand is how collaboration works.
- Aww. Zoobooks! The journey to field studies of lions in Kenya starts with a subscription to Zoobooks.
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Science online, advice that doesn’t add up edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The resident roller-derby expert discusses metagenomics on the track.
- And, at the Molecular Ecologist: An interview with Julian Catchen, creator of “stacks,” in two parts.
- This probably explains Nowak et al. (2010), eh? E.O. Wilson says “great scientist ≠ good at math”. Math-knowing scientists object variously, and enlist some big names in response. But the most biting critique is, maybe what Wilson says is true—if you’re E.O. Wilson.
- “… could be catastrophic.” White-nose fungus has been spotted in a cave harboring endangered bats.
- Don’t panic. Yet. Reed Elsevier buys Mendeley. Mendeley users are not pleased. But Mendeley staff say it’ll be okay.
- Ditto for other crops, probably. A new emerging threat to biodiversity could be vineyards relocating farther north.
- Good luck! Trying to get through to the anti-vaxxer in the family.
- No, really. Bedbug control via bean-leaf trichome.
- Of course, larger N is going to cost you. Survey of neuroscience papers finds that most studies are statistically underpowered.
- Put on your horn-rims. This new history of eggheads looks pretty great.
- Of course, if you use Mendeley, the auto-import … oh, right. A field guide to “citation download” links on journal websites.
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Science online, plight of the honeybees edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I describe my latest work with Joshua trees.
- And, at The Molecular Ecologist: Thoughts about fieldwork, and the announcement of Molecular Ecology‘s first genome resources note.
- Gather ye bee-pollinated produce while ye may. Last year, colony collapse disorder took out up to half of the U.S. honeybee population.
- Pretty bad. How bad will tar sands oil be for the climate?
- Faster than a speeding cliff swallow. On the implications of rapid evolution for conservation.
- Evolution swings every which way. The natural history of human sexuality isn’t so much “tragically confused,” as wonderfully complex.
- It’s not worth the effort, apparently. Why haven’t plants and animals evolved sensitivity to radio waves?
- Slogan vs. biology: advantage, biology. Abortion does indeed stop a beating heart—if by “beating heart” you mean a pulsing tube of cells.
- “Nature being what it is, the badass crab struck hard.” How invasive European green crabs are helping restore wetlands on Cape Cod.
- Specifically, snakes. Teaching Medelian genetics with a case study more interesting than Mendel’s peas.
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Science online, lupins for dinner edition
- This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Which came first: the obese chicken, or its obese gut microbiota?
- And at The Molecular Ecologist: A new method for summarizing and comparing microbial diversity; plus new views of hair traps for pikas and aerial drones for landscape genetics.
- Lupins—yum! Prepping new food crops for a climate-changed world.
- Today in counterintuitive juxtapositions. If you removed every ship from the ocean, the resulting drop in sea level would be made up by the effects of climate change in about six hours.
- Not easy even if you do it directly. Measuring the human mutation rate.
- Would it have killed them to consult the family? Henrietta Lacks is still immortal, and still raising questions about research ethics—this time over the public release of the HeLa genome.
- The old-school approach. On tinkering as a research program.
- “… flirts with predatory OA status.” A pretty scathing review of post-publication review at F1000.
- Context matters more than “motivation.” What campaigns against climate change can learn from public health campaigns.
- What is this I can’t even. Targeted advertising based on your genome?
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Science online, selected swallows edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Doing natural history like a Victorian—but with gigabytes of genetic data.
- And, at the Molecular Ecologist: A tale of two Dryad submissions.
- Speedy evolution in more ways than one. Cliff swallows living under highway bridges have evolved shorter wings—maybe because they help dodge oncoming cars.
- Breaking! It’s possible to make science accessible without reinforcing sexist stereotypes.
- Which, I would argue, is most of the time. When evolution and ecology happen at the same time.
- Not the only way in which it’s fantastical. The paleofantasy of “alternative” medicine.
- Step one: read good science writing. How to write good science.
- Handy! Convert technical units of measurement into more comprehensible terms using Wolfram Alpha!
- And why that makes the whole business suspect. Why proposals to resurrect extinct species are really all about Homo sapiens.
- First, they came for the political scientists … The U.S. Senate decides it can ban the National Science Foundation from funding an entire field of research.
- Related: who still does this? Why do we call it the “wild type,” anyway?
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Science online, travellin’ yeast edition
- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I discuss my latest paper, study in reconstructing evolutionary relationships with genome-wide data.
- And, at the Molecular Ecologist: How human migration has shaped the diversity of our domesticated microbes.
- Yow. Tracking changes in people’s personal microbial communities during a roller-derby.
- Awww. Bees are better able to remember flowers that offer them caffeinated nectar.
- Eek. The CDC’s warnings about antibiotic-resistant bacteria are getting scary.
- Yay! Ambitious plans to genetically engineer a blight-resistant American chestnut are looking promising.
- Oy. Another meteorite, another claim of fossilized extraterrestrial life.
- Not good. This year’s overwintering monarch butterfly population is worryingly small.
- Nifty. For some early birds, feathers on their legs might have formed a second pair of wings.
- Heh. Seven things that are older than the (creationist) universe.
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