science blogging

As you may have noticed from the extended radio silence, it's been a busy few months between classes (both taking them and giving them), tenure packaging, and research. To add another responsibility to the mix, I gave a talk a few weeks back at the National Institute for Animal Agriculture's annual symposium. This year, the featured topic was antibiotics and agriculture, so I was invited to give an overview of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and livestock. While I'm always happy to give talks to new audiences, discussing my work and the state of the field in general, I have to…
... drumroll please.... . .. ... .... ..... I'M IN! I feel so honored to be chosen as one of the top 9 finalists! Go check out the post that made it: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs Of course, there are some FANTASTIC posts in the top set with me. Go check out all of them! They include my fellow sciblings Jason and Eric, as well as other great bloggers like Ed, Margaret and Carl. Basically, it's a list of everyone I mentioned before, plus a couple of other ones just for kicks ;) Congrats to all, and good luck to everyone! I can't wait to see who Dawkins picks as the Top Quark!
Sorry to be so late to the announcement party - my stupid, f-cking lovely computer has decided that it doesn't feel like connecting to the internets anymore, so I'm a little hard up for online time. Anyhoo, thank you to everyone who voted for Observations of a Nerd! Thanks to you, my post "Evolution: The Curious Case Of Dogs" has made it to the semi-final round. You can see all the other semi-finalists here. There's some stiff competition in there, notably from fellow generalist sci-blogger Ed Yong, my favorite botanist Margaret, and a slew of scibling like Scicurious, Jason Goldman, and…
Anne Jefferson from Highly Allochthonous pointed me to a new essay from Geoscientist Online, the member magazine of the Geological Society (UK). That essay points both to the survey of women geobloggers (previously mentioned here) and a survey done by Lutz Geissler, Robert Huber, and Callan Bentley. (probably haven't mentioned before). In the Geoscientist essay by Michael Welland, he discusses his own slowness in taking up blogging, but also his enjoyment of the geoblogosphere and the community he finds there. He learns of new things he wouldn't come across in his other readings and he…
Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look…
This was originally posted 1/9/2009 on my old blog. Due to popular demand (well 3 requests :) ), this is a commentary and additional information for my conference paper and presentation: Pikas, C. K. (2008). Detecting Communities in Science Blogs. Paper presented at eScience '08. IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience, 2008. Indianapolis. 95-102. doi:10.1109/eScience.2008.30 (available in IEEE Xplore to institutional subscribers) [also self-archived - free!- here] The presentation is embedded in another blog post, and is available online at SlideShare. The video of me talking…
Sometimes you have to just let go and release something to the wild. I have mentioned on a few occasions a qualitative study I did prior to the network study. To be honest, I think I actually did it in the Fall of 2007 ?! I thought (and was encouraged to believe) that I could get a journal article from it, but at this point, I've moved on.  With the recent publication of another article on science blogs, I thought that this needed to be out there. Plus, it's really not fair to the participants who gave me their time. After re-reading this just now, I don't think it's bad, but the title is…
It's finally here! We have a list of elite blog posts chosen by the best of the best to publish in this year's Open Laboratory. Yours truly got the double honor - I got to help judge the entries and, by some miracle, one of mine made the cut! I display these proudly: Anyhow, go check out all the winners and congrats to all who made it!
Last year, thanks to you, my loyal beloved readers, I was able to attend the Science Online conference held in London, England, where I was a speaker. This conference is being held again this year -- and I hope to be there! Proposed topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifiers and measuring the impact of research. Science Online 2009 London is scheduled for 22 August at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, thanks to the generous support of Nature Network, Mendeley Research Networks and The Royal…
I had the happy pleasure of visiting on Friday with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Bora Zivkovic for a panel discussion in a course at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. Directed by Dr Misha Angrist, PubPol 196S "Science in the Media" is described in the course catalog as follows: Those who write about science, health and related policy matters for a general audience face a formidable challenge: to make complex, nuanced ideas understandable to the nonscientist in a limited amount of space and in ways that are engaging and entertaining, even if the topic is far outside the…
The blogosphere, which is that part of the internet occupied by blogs, is experiencing explosive growth. According to Technorati, one of the major blog tracking services on the internet, the number of new blogs created increased from 75,000 to 175,000 per day from April 2007 to April 2008. Currently, there are at least an estimated 112 million active blogs. These blogs discuss virtually everything from politics to dating, but there is one topic area that lags far behind in this public scrutiny: science. Even though many millions of active blogs exist, it is estimated that only 1500-2500…
I have been taking pictures to share with you but unfortunately, forgot the equipment necessary to download the images from my camera to my laptop, so we all will have to wait a little while longer. I am disappointed by this because London is so story-book magical and you all just have to see it! I am absolutely exhausted though. The night before I was to leave, my NYC neighbors decided to blast their stereos through much of the night, so I didn't get much sleep (not that I could have slept anyway, really), and then, anticipating that I would not be able to sleep on the flight to London, I…