Blogs
drorzel | July 4, 2010It's Independence Day here in the US, where we spend the day playing with fire (grilling during the day, fireworks at night) to express our gratitude for not needing to give a damn about the British royal family. Or something like that.
Since I'm going to do my patriotic playing-with-fire duty (augmented by a possible trip to the zoo with SteelyKid), there won't be any deep thoughts forthcoming today, but to give those of you in need of web-based entertainment something to do, here's a question for all my readers:
Who are you, and how did you get here?
It's been a while since I did one of…
drorzel | June 24, 2010I'm seriously lacking in bloggy inspiration at the moment. So we'll fall back on something that has worked a couple of times in the past:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.
The usual disclaimers apply: questions that are pointlessly obnoxious or whose answers would get me in trouble of some sort ("What are three things you hate about the Deans to whom you report?") will be ignored or get blow-off answers. I'…
kcollins | May 18, 2010I am going to make a little confession here, I love science and I really love working for the USA Science and Engineering festival. Why? I am passionate about getting science into our culture in a hands-on way and making people say: wow...science is cool AND fun.But one thing I have found about working for the Festival in its inaugural year, not everyone is aware of the festival and I want to change that.
Do YOU love science? Do YOU use social media? Are YOU interested in helping the USA Science and Engineering festival? You CAN in a variety of different ways. Check this video out first.
As…
drorzel | May 17, 2010Matt's Sunday Function this week is a weird one, a series that is only conditionally convergent:
So the sum of the infinite series, by inexorable logic, is both ln(2) and ln(2)/2. How is this possible?
Of course it isn't. The flaw in our logic is the assumption that the series has a definite sum - in the mathematical parlance, that it's absolutely convergent. This series is not, it's only conditionally convergent. In fact you can show (the great G.F.B. Riemann was the first) that with judicious rearrangement, you can get this series to converge to anything at all. As such it's only…
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of ILIt's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni Olshen…
drorzel | May 2, 2010Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal):
Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…
cagapakis | April 29, 2010I got the chance to attend a panel discussion about science and the media presented by the UK-based charity Sense About Science. The audience was primarily scientists, many of whom were angry about how science is presented in the media: the outlandish claims, the hype, presenting "both sides" of stories where there is clear scientific consensus. The panel included a professional scientist who teaches about communicating with the public, an editor at the journal Cell, and a science reporter for the Boston Globe.
The panel was mostly about "traditional" media, with a little shout-out to blogs…
drorzel | April 29, 2010Over in Twitter-land, S. C. Kavassalis notes a Googler who's not afraid to ask the big questions:
Weird Google search of the week: 'the "one" scientific idea that we need to believe'. Uh um, I'm sure my blog couldn't possibly answer that.
It's a good question, though, ad there are a couple of different ways to take it. You could read it as "What one scientific idea is supported by the most experimental proof?" or you could read it as "What one idea is most central to science generally?"
"The Standard Model" was quickly suggested on Twitter, which could fit either. I think it might be…
drorzel | April 15, 2010The pace has slowed, but there are still occasional sightings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in my Google vanity searches:
It turns up on library blogs with some regularity. This particular one, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is nice because it's not just a rewrite of the publicity copy
I was really excited to see Daily Kos show up as one of the sites found by the blog search, because they have bazillions of readers. It was only a plug in a comment, but still...
The strangest-- in a good way-- mention recently was this passing reference in a newspaper column from Michigan,…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
drorzel | March 23, 2010The winners of the first Research Blogging Awards were announced today, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this blog was named the "Best Blog -- Chemistry, Physics, or Astronomy." I knew that I was nominated-- I was one of the judges, and while I abstained from voting on my own blog, I did see it in the list with many other excellent blogs. Given that research blogging is only a small part of what I do, I didn't expect to win at all.
(In the manner of such awards, I now feel guilty for not having done any ResearchBlogging posts in ages, so I've queued one up for tomorrow morning…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2010tags: online advertising, Samsung, digital camera, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, profile pictures, streaming video
This video clip is a hilarious ad for a Samsung digital camera that is aimed specifically at all of us online personalities. We all know the infamous "MySpace angle" of profile pictures, and who can ignore the slew of pouty-mouthed snapshots on Facebook? Well, universally flattering angle, the gig is up. Heck, even Samsung knows the tricks of the profile pic trade and calls out the most common photo maneuvers in a new ad. Quite clever, Samsung.
razib | March 7, 2010Felix Salmon, Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ:
The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren't really bloggers at heart. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a long and detailed blog entry on the court case between JP Morgan and Mexico's Cablevisión. The WSJ's Deal Journal blog didn't link to it, but a couple of days later, the blog's lead writer, Michael Corkery, had a piece in the print version of the newspaper which added nothing to the story, quoted the same Cablevisión executive that I had spoken to,…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
drorzel | February 15, 2010I'm giving up reading blogs for Lent.
The proximate cause of this is Bora's latest blame-the-media post, which is just deja vu all over again, because I'm pretty sure this exact conversation has gone on ten times before (the fact that scientists find other scientists compelling speakers does not mean that scientists are good at communicating to the general public). But this is really part of a larger disillusionment with the medium as a whole that's been growing for the past several months. More and more, I'm finding that reading blogs is pissing me off to no good end.
This is a fairly…
drorzel | February 10, 2010The never-ending discussion of whether the Web can or should replace books has shifted into the corners of blogdom that I follow again, with Kevin Drum arguing for more books, Henry Farrell arguing for shorter books, and Jim Henley agreeing with Henry, and expanding it to fiction. They're all at least partly right-- more shorter books would be a good thing.
I do want to pick up on one thing Kevin said, though. He writes:
This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex…
drorzel | February 7, 2010My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well-- the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren't there, but want to know what I talked about, here are the slides on SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Weblogs Can Help
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
This flattens out some of the more animation-dependent jokes, but gets you the basic idea. It is, of…
drorzel | February 4, 2010Despite my best efforts to sleep late and miss my flight, I made it to the airport with plenty of time to get on my flight to DC. Which means that I will, i fact, be giving a talk TODAY at 3:30 pm at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help."
If you're in the DC area, and not stuck in a long line to buy bread and milk in advance of the coming Snowpocalypse, come to my talk, which will feature at least…
stoat | February 2, 2010Klimazwiebel is on my reader list, but I don't usually bother with the comments. It looks a bit like the septics are disappointed with him. And he with them: And, damn it, give your names, when making strong statements. When you have an opinion, then you should have also a name. Still, there are some good comments over there (Mike Hulme was there, though he had little to say when I looked).
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…