Blogs
rallain | June 1, 2009So, there is this Science Blogging Award from 3 QuarksDaily. Of course I nominated one of my own post - The Physics of Fantastic Contraption. The first stage of the competition lets readers vote for their favorite blog post. This seems sort of like a popularity contest. Then the top votes will be judged and a winner determined. The biggest problem I see is that there is a wide variety of posts, from physics to biology to medicine. It is kind of like voting for the best food with bananas and steak in there for the voting. Sometimes, you just need a banana.
Anyway, in looking at this…
bioephemera | May 31, 2009If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program?
Here's Rosen's take on it:
One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…
drorzel | May 28, 2009I already mentioned this in a Links Dump, but there's enough buzz that it's probably worth a full post: the people at Three Quarks Daily have decided to offer prizes for blog writing:
Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.
About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The…
drorzel | May 18, 2009Confessions of a Science Librarian has joined ScienceBlogs. So, no more eating Chinese food in the stacks, and try to keep the noise down.
sciencepunk | May 15, 2009Over at the Mental Indigestion blog, Dr Jim teaches us an important lesson in appropriate games to play with greater apes whilst down the pub. Namely, do not challenge a chimp to an arm wrestling match:
As you take up the strain, know that the fine-tuned positioning and slow, steady building of muscle force you exert is due to the greater amount of grey matter that you posses in your spinal cord; motor neuron nerves cells that connect to muscle fibres and regulate muscle movement. The huge surplus of motor neurons you possess allows you to engage smaller portions of your muscles at any given…
drorzel | May 11, 2009Over at the Inverse Square blog, Tom Levenson announces that he's started Twittering in a post that contains, via Carl Zimmer, the best argument for why Twitter matters:
Carl laughs me out of my seat. He points out that he tweeted his visit to my class, and received in return a couple of requests to pass on hellos from blogospheric friends I haven't seen since January (hello back, Dave); that a growing audience exists to feed him almost real time reactions to questions; that whatever I might think there is a hierarchy of information, and if I ignore the swift and the short, then I lose my…
drorzel | May 1, 2009Like Sauron creeping into Dol Guldur, Quantum Diaries has returned to darken the blogosphere once more, driving Tommaso Dorigo before it--
Oh, wait. More good science blogs is a good thing, not a creeping menace. Even if they are particle physicists.
Anyway, in a move that is unrelated to the return of Quantum Diaries, and, in fact, happened two weeks ago, Tommaso Dorigo, a survivor of the original Quantum Diaries, has closed up shop and moved to ScientificBlogging.com. Had I known he was thinking of moving, I would've pushed the Corporate Masters to invite him to ScienceBlogs so we could…
drorzel | April 29, 2009I've had the Quiche Moraine post on editing open in a browser tab for far too long, now, but it deserves a more prominent comment than just a link in the daily links dump. It really is an excellent presentation of the important role of editing:
Editing requires the strange ability to stand in the place of the audience and the author simultaneously. As an editor reads a piece, whether it be a story or a journal article, they have to understand what the author intended to say without losing track of not just what one individual reader will take away, but how the piece will come across to…
bioephemera | April 28, 2009How much more successful would Gravity's Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box?
Want to become a high-profile Twitter superstar? McSweeney's tells you exactly how. Maybe Google is making everyone stupid, but if so, the bar for a successful writer is now much lower! w00t!
drorzel | April 28, 2009My major "service" activity at work is involvement with the Minerva program, which attempts to blur the line between academic and residential life. I enjoy this because it gives me the opportunity to work closely with students outside a narrow academic context, and I've been very impressed with the creativity and responsibility of the students involved.
Part of the program is also to get faculty involved, and this runs into more problems. The biggest of which is probably a mismatch between the time scales on which students and faculty operate. If you try to get faculty to do something in the…
drorzel | April 26, 2009I've had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it's irritating as hell:
Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog.
The presence of sponsored results means there's action in the marketplace…
drorzel | April 14, 2009Over the weekend on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit posed an interesting question:
Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other?
A lot of the discussion consists of tedious (and non-specific) banging on about the wonders of start-ups, but there's some good stuff in there if you have the patience to read through it.
Buried in there with…
bioephemera | April 6, 2009Scibling Bora has expressed his wish "to end once for all the entire genre of discussing the "bloggers vs. journalists" trope," and tried to do so with perhaps the most massive science-journalism-Web2.0 post evah.
Bora says,
the whole "bloggers will replace journalists" trope is silly and wrong. No, journalists will replace journalists. It's just that there will be fewer of them paid, and more of us unpaid. Some will be ex-newspapermen, others ex-bloggers, but both will be journalists. Instead of on paper, journalism will happen online. Instead of massaging your article to fit into two inches…
drorzel | April 3, 2009In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we instituted a complicated emergency alert system, involving sirens, loudspeakers, text messages, and emails. The whole thing gets tested far more frequently than it really needs to-- every few weeks, we get a barrage of emails warning us that a test is coming up, then another barrage of emails and text messages on the day of the test.
The system has been used exactly once, and it was a fiasco. A year or so ago, we got a flurry of messages telling us that there had been a shooting a couple of blocks from campus. These directed everyone to a web…
bioephemera | March 29, 2009Continuing the current discussion of the questionable quality of popular science journalism, British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen weighs in at the New Scientist with his personal experiences of misrepresented research. Baron-Cohen complains that earlier this year, several articles on his work linking prenatal testosterone levels to autistic traits, including coverage in the Guardian, were titled and subtitled misleadingly:
It has left me wondering: who are the headline writers? Articles and columns in newspapers are bylined so there is some accountability when they get things wrong. In this…
sciencewoman | March 24, 2009Yesterday Sheril Kirschenbaum and Chris Mooney of the Intersection announced that they were leaving Scienceblogs in favor of new digs at Discover. Unfortunately, commenters on other blogs around those parts have been behaving badly on posts welcoming the new bloggers. It appears that it doesn't matter how good a scientist and writer a blogger is, if she's female, only her appearance matters. (One more reason I only show off my footwear.)
Physioprof has an excellent (and relatively profanity-free!) post up taking apart this behavior and explaining why it is not appropriate to make your first…
drorzel | March 23, 2009Chris and Sheril announced today that The Intersection has gone over to the Dark Side moved to Discover's growing collection of high-quality science blogs. They're now available at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection.
This is not entirely unexpected, but I wish them well in their spiffy new digs. They're the second blog to move from ScienceBlogs to Discover (after Carl Zimmer), and I believe the first of the original 14 blogs to move elsewhere (a couple have shut down, but the rest of us are still here). It's probably too early to really say whether this constitutes a trend or not.
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
drorzel | March 14, 2009One of last year's highest-traffic posts was, weirdly, Talk Like a Physicist. I say "weirdly" because it wasn't much more than a link to Tom at Swans On Tea.
It's that time of year again, and Tom's back with an updated list of vocabulary for your physicist-talking needs. I don't have much to add, but one of Tom's items:
We physicists quantify relationships -- something that is complicated is "nonlinear," or even "highly nonlinear." Opposites are "inversely proportional"
reminded me of a great literary reference, from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life":
"So they can read a word with equal ease…
drorzel | March 7, 2009The Flamewar That Ate LiveJournal continues its livejournophagy (I've only caught the edges of it, and that alone is a carnival of suck-- if you want to know more, Jo Walton's recent post gets the feel, and contains links to more). In one of several efforts to bring something positive out of this, Kate has created a LiveJournal community:
This community is meant to be a place that rounds up the anti-derailing efforts in a central location for the benefit of those who want to continue the conversations about cultural appropriation, racial diversity and multiculturalism in SFF fiction and…