Blogging
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2009The 71th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Afarensis on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to the bloggin' australopithecine. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
emjohnson | June 28, 2009 Our newborn takes after his father.The following is something of an impromptu experiment in live birth twittering. It started out simply as a means to update friends and family, but as events transpired we received some unexpected international attention. The entire labor lasted 47 hours, involved three different locations and two surgeries. This after we had carefully planned for a natural birth with no interventions. Thank you to the hundreds of people in at least eight countries who followed our story and sent messages of support. Special thanks to Henry Gee, Senior Editor of…
clock | June 26, 2009As you may already be aware I am about to embark on a trip to Europe again. I will be traveling on Sunday and arriving at Lindau, Germany on Monday for the 59th Meeting of Nobel Laureates. The list of Nobel Laureates (23 of them) and the list of about 600 young researchers from 66 countries are very impressive. Of course, not being a chemist, I'll have to do some homework before I go (I printed out the complete list of descriptions of all of them to read on the airplane), learning what these people did to get their prizes and what the younger ones are doing hoping to get a Nobel in the future…
sjurvetson | June 26, 2009As I prepare to hand off this photoblog to Cobalt123, I thought I would share my favorite non-rocket photos. Each clicks through to a story or geeky observation.
Last Thoughts
Magic Toes
Fire & Ice
A Beautiful Computation
in the Wolfram sense
Curiosity
Diamond Age & Eyes
and even some people
Namaste.
aardvarchaeology | June 26, 2009As you may know, Dear Reader, this blog can be perused selectively by theme if you click "Archives" in the menu bar up top. For a long time I've been tagging entries straying from the blog's main themes "NOIBN", Not Otherwise Indicated By Name. But realising recently that there were almost a hundred such entries, I sorted through them and found a few recurring themes there. Thus a bunch of new entry categories:
Environment
Health
Politics
Space
Travel
Getting this sorted out was quite a chore due to the glacial slowness of Sb's poor over-taxed server. But chances are it'll get upgraded…
awild | June 24, 2009
Shortly before I left for Florida, my post on the taxonomy of Strumigenys spurred a comment from an anonymous colleague:
I wouldnât be so bold as to publish so many evaluations of ideas without the backing of formal peer review. I wouldnât be as concerned about the validity of my criticisms, but rather the perceived validity. Perhaps Iâm hypersensitive to alienating other scientists. I just wouldnât want to be responsible for airing other peopleâs dirty laundry.
Iâm not saying that youâre unfair. But I think most people whose work is being reviewed on your site feel that it wonât stand up to…
clock | June 20, 2009On Twitter, things can be fast and unpredictable. Like yesterday. I was having an interesting discussion with @jason_pontin about the changing role of quoting sourses in Old vs. New journalism, when he suddenly said he had to go and then asked me if I would be interested in joining him. He was going to talk to a group of business-folks at the MIT Enterprise Forum about Web 2.0 and asked me to come in for a few minutes and explain, on Twitter, what Twitter is about. An hour later, it happened. Here is the stream (you can find it yourself by searching Twitter for #MITEO):
@jason_pontin Follow…
clock | June 19, 2009A bunch of interesting Twitterers aggregated in NYC a couple of days ago at the 140 characters conference, discussing various aspects of and uses of Twitter. One of the sessions was about Twitter and Science, led by @thesciencebabe and @jayhawkbabe. I am very jealous I could not be there, but we can all watch the video of their session:
Happy to see the last slide, with @PLoS as one of the recommended Twitter streams to follow for those interested in science.
jdupuis | June 19, 2009This is the third in my informal trilogy on engaging in social media. The first two are here and here.
I left off last time with this sentiment:
It seems to me that one possibility if we want to engage these groups, is that we have to figure out where they already are and how we can fit into and improve that rather than try and build something completely new that we'll then try and entice everyone to join.
Where do we go from here? Maybe if the communities we build were more accepting, civil and inclusive, that would be a start.
Well, I like what Clay Shirky said recently about how our…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2009The sixty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Wanna Be An Anthropologist. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
sciencewoman | June 16, 2009Retweeting Zuska:
Kim at All of My Faults Are Stress Related asks:
I've got a question for women readers, especially those in the geosciences, environmental sciences, or field sciences: what do you get out of reading blogs? And if you have a blog yourself, what do you get out of writing it?
I'm asking because there's a session at this year's Geological Society of America meeting on "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences" (and that's in the applied geosciences as well as in academia), and I wondered whether blogs…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2009The 70th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Wanna Be An Anthropologist on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Paul. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
laelaps | June 15, 2009Paleo-blogger Zach has revitalized the long-dormant Boneyard carnival over at When Pigs Fly Returns. He has collected a nice assortment of links, but if you want to submit some more, Zach's the guy to talk to. I am sorry that I no longer have the time to run the Boneyard myself, but I am glad that others are going to keep it going. Thanks, Zach!
jdupuis | June 13, 2009It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…
awild | June 12, 2009
A Podabrus soldier beetle hides away in the leafy folds of an understory plant in an eastern deciduous forest. Soldier beetles (family Cantharidae) are predators of other arthropods.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | June 11, 2009
Image by Flickr user traviswilcoxen
Tomorrow morning I leave for a week at the Archbold Biological Station in the scrublands of central Florida. Archbold is a magical place filled with charmingly unique plants and animals. I spent a summer there in 1995; this will be my first visit since then. With any luck I'll return with a pile of new photographs. On the list to shoot: the Florida harvester ant, Platythyrea punctata, and a couple scrub endemics like the graceful Dorymyrmex elegans.
I've pre-scheduled a few posts while I'm away so the blog won't go quiet, but I may be slow…
jdupuis | June 11, 2009It's with great pleasure that I welcome Walt Crawford and his blog, Walt at Random, to the ScienceBlogs family.
I've been following Walt's writings on the library world for a long time, probably at least seven years, and his Cites &Insights ejournal is a terrific source of links and commentary. Interestingly, it was Walt that inspired me to blog. Interesting, you say, because I've actually been blogging longer than Walt. How is this possible?
Well, it's those early days of Cites & Insights that inspired me to start expressing myself on professional topics. At the time, I was…
clock | June 9, 2009Go say Hello to Walt Crawford at Walt at Random.
Walt is Editorial Director for the Library Leadership Network and also publishes an e-journal Cites & Insights. You can get a taste for his blogging on his old blog, of course.
clock | June 5, 2009Of course the Course description for JOMC 449 - Virtual Communities, Smart Mobs, Citizen Journalism and Participatory Culture is made in video. All the 'readings' are viewings of video, all assignments are video-making. So cool!
Fall 2009 MW 3:30 - 4:45, UNC Chapel Hill, Instructor: Paul Jones