sciencepunk | April 26, 2009
Thanks to Sandy for letting me know about the Center for Disease Control's Twitter Feed, which will keep you up to date with the current swine flu outbreak. Latest news is 20 confirmed cases in the US, with one hospitalisation, and clear human-to-human spread. Over at Effect Measure, Paul Revere has a well-informed running commentary of the emerging virus.
ddobbs | April 25, 2009Maureen Dowd pretty much asked for parody of her clueless snarkdown of Twitter. From Nancy Friedman at Frittancy
Telephone SAN FRANCISCO -- I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. -- Maureen Dowd, "To Tweet or Not to Tweet," New York Times, April 22, 2009.
BOSTON --Edgar Allan Poe would love Alexander Graham Bell's workshop here. Pendulums, buzzers, and ticking sounds everywhere, with a mysterious note to the chambermaid in crabbed script. In a droll nod to shifting technologies, there's an 18th-century ear trumpet on the…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2009Follow this, if you will.
A couple of week back I wrote a mostly tongue-in-cheek post titled "Why Twitter is Evil," in the form of a parody of "25 random things about me." Each of the 25 reasons was less than 140 characters long. It was not meant to be taken seriously, although as a subsequent post, "The problem with Twitter" laid out, I do have serious objections to the medium. Here's what happened:
That second post (the one where I explore the sociological consequences of tweeting and following tweets), included a reference to another blogger's disdain for the tweets of writers he otherwise…
amillikan | April 21, 2009
With news headlines prompting readers to question if Twitter causes a decay in one's moral fabric, ScienceBloggers are attempting to set the record straight. As Jessica Palmer from Bioephemera explains, the mainstream media got wind of a press release from the University of Southern California, the author of which jumped to conclusions based on hypothetical speculations in the 'future applications' section of a neuroscience paper unrelated to Twitter. The press release claimed the networking tool "might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions, with potentially negative…
bioephemera | April 19, 2009We all know Twitter can be annoying, but is it really evil? During the past week, you may have heard that there is brand-new neuroscientific evidence proving exactly that. But the hype turns out to be just that: hype.
It all started with a press release from USC about an upcoming PNAS paper by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, entitled "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion." The USC press release, which was picked up by EurekAlert and other outlets, says:
The finding, contained in one of the first brain studies of inspirational emotions in a field dominated by a focus…
hrynyshyn | April 17, 2009Every day it seems there's a new essay or post about social networking fatigue, virtual connectivity's isolating effects, and the threats posed by rapid-fire media. Most of all, though, it's about the problem with Twitter. My "25 random things I hate about Twitter" post attracted an usually large amount of traffic, including several visits from those who were alerted to the piece via Twitter, but that was written at least half in jest. Now allow me to share with you some more carefully considered criticisms.
The problem with Twitter is not that it's useless. As überTwitterfan Coturnix has…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2009Okay, I hate "microblogging" since I view it as a form of electronic trivial pursuit, which is anathema to any real learning or knowledge, unlike .. erm, blog writing.
Okay, you can all stop laughing out there (yes, I can hear you!) since I set up my very own twitter account, which means you all can communicate with each other and with me using your iPhone, or you can text me (and each other, of course!) using your mobile phone or whatever else you drag around with you from one wifi source to another. (Personally, I use my laptop, a gorgeous new MacBookPro, but it is rather large and heavy…
amillikan | April 5, 2009While the rumor that Google is in "late stage negotiations" to acquire Twitter, the social networking website based on text message-style entries of 140 characters, hasn't been confirmed, the feasibility of such a notion says volumes about Twitter's massive rise in popularity over the past years. Now the third-largest social networking website (behind facebook and myspace), Twitter has revolutionized the way information is generated and communicated. Naturally, ScienceBloggers are no stranger to this micro-blogging phenomenon. Bora from A Blog Around the Clock reflects on how social…
bioephemera | March 31, 2009
My friend John Ohab is hosting a new DoD webcast called "Armed With Science." Sure, it has an over-the-top logo reminiscent of the Syfy Channel (I like to intone "ARMED WITH SCIENCE" with the same cadence as "PIGS IN SPACE!"), but the show turns out to be really well-done and interesting. Each episode is a half-hour interview with a researchers in a scientific field relevant to the military: sometimes that means SONAR or geopositioning, but they also take on general science topics like Brain Awareness Week at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. It's a nice mix of topics, and it's…
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…
bioephemera | March 12, 2009The Pi Day bill went up for a vote today and passed 391-10. Now Congressman Jason Chaffetz explains (via Twitter, natch) why he dared vote against the hallowed number:
Fie, fie! No Yes PeCan Pi for you, Representative Chaffetz (R-Utah)! But kudos for a creative excuse.
amillikan | March 7, 2009
In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson discuss a recent debate about the identity of humanity's closest living relatives, an anthropological case study in the link between technology and violence, and the dizzying complexity of the mathematics of the financial crisis. And just in case you'd forgotten that John and George aren't fanatics about the Internet Age, they made sure to squeeze in a bit of curmudgeonly ranting against Twitter.
ddobbs | February 11, 2009
Just lost my physical science book... How is that possible? It's so BIG.
People do not believe in science.
masturbation IS a science
why did i decide to get involved with this computer science networking stuff? i am an arts person! what was i thinking? lol
sitting here doing science homework , o fun.
painting my nails... but should probably do my science homework?
Science nerd Alert:I just spent an hour learning about the evolution of early tetrapods. Evolution is so damn cool
its 7 pm i have 3 hours to get all caught up on my science paper design a wine poster and type of my life plan for…
cevans | November 10, 2008
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the…