Blogging
clock | August 4, 2008Due to weather prognosis and expectation of a large crowd, the Meet The SciBling event will have to change location:
....we've decided to change the location of Saturday's Reader Meetup. The new spot will be at a bar on the west side called Social. (It's about 20 blocks south of the AMNH)....
2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9
Social
795 8th Ave (close to 48th St.)
New York, NY 10019
clock | August 4, 2008Vedran Vucic has put together a new aggregator that uses some of the RSS feeds from scienceblogs.com. Check it out here. It is mainly going to be shown to researchers and interested folks in Serbia, but of course everyone in the world can access it and use it.
neurophilosophy | August 3, 2008You've probably noticed the yellow banner ads at the top of the page. They're advertising a reader survey being conducted by ScienceBlogs at the moment. The survey is open to everyone and if you fill it out - it'll take about 10 minutes - you'll be in with a chance of winning a 40Gb iPod, iPhone and MacBook Air.
ScienceBlogs has also added the 72nd blog to its network. Built on Facts is a physics blog written by Matt Springer, a graduate student at Texas A&M University.
clock | August 3, 2008Classroom 2.0:
...the social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.
NoodleTools: Basic Language Literacy:
Online Opportunities for Young Writers - Publications Which Accept Student Submissions
clock | August 3, 2008See those yellow banners around the site today? Click on one of them, or click here and do a quick survey - we are trying to make this a better place for all of you and need to know what you think and what you want.
And if you participate you may even win something, e.g., an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air or a 40GB Apple TV!
clock | August 2, 2008CNN creates blogging policy, encourages employees to engage in sockpuppetry:
Chez Pazienza, a former CNN producer who was fired six months ago for having a personal blog, obtained a copy of the new blogging policy that his former employer sent out to all staff (I've also copy and pasted it below). While it allows employees to blog, they have to get it approved by a supervisor and it bars them from mentioning anything that CNN would cover -- in other words, it keeps them from talking about just about anything but their own belly lint. And even that would be ruled out if we all found out…
clock | August 2, 2008I got a million and a half invitations to the Big Blogger Bash in Raleigh the other day, but unfortunately I could not make it.
At the bash, Ginny Skalski and Wayne Sutton unveiled their brand new project - a website called 30Threads, which will cover all sorts of locally interesting stories and engage the local community. It certainly already has interesting stories and an interesting and novel layout. Looks like the media of the 21st century should look like (especially after all but hyper-local newspapers die out or completely move online).
I bookmarked it and will keep an eye - it looks…
clock | August 1, 2008Go say Hello to Matt Springer at Built on Facts, the latest addition to The Borg!
clock | July 31, 2008There is a new study out there - Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial - that some people liked, but Peter Suber and Stephan Harnad describe why the study is flawed (read Harnad's entire post for more):
To show that the OA advantage is an artefact of self-selection bias (or any other factor), you first have to produce the OA advantage and then show that it is eliminated by eliminating self-selection bias (or any other artefact).
This is not what Davis et al did. They simply showed that they could detect no OA advantage one year after publication…
clock | July 31, 2008Do you want to spend two hours chatting with Grrrl, Janet, Professor Steve Steve (or two or three of them), me and many more SciBlings and readers?
If yes, this is where you should go:
We'll be meeting at 2:00 pm on Saturday, August 9, at the Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park. Once there, please head to the cafe tables and chairs set by the trees on the upper terrace, facing the Rose Center. The terrace is accessible from the Theodore Roosevelt Park at 81st Street and Columbus Avenue.
This is an outdoor location with tables and shade, which we…
neurophilosophy | July 31, 2008I don't have internet access where I'm working at the moment, hence the lack of updates this week. For the same reason, blogging is likely to be intermittent for the next week or two.
During that time, I'll be doing some background reading about potential research projects for the final year of my Masters. I also have nearly a dozen books that have been sent to me by authors and publicists.
I'll be posting reviews of those books over the next month. I'm also preparing my interview with Heather Perry (the woman who performed a self-trepanation), and have a major piece of work in the pipeline…
clock | July 30, 2008Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you're really sick and want to learn more about what you have.:
* Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information.
* Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS…
clock | July 30, 2008PZ just had a book review published in Nature:
Science and evolution have an advocate in Kenneth Miller, one of North America's eminent knights-errant, a scientist who is active in defending evolutionary theory in the conflict between evolution and creationism. He has been at the centre of many recent debates about science education, most prominently testifying against intelligent design creationism in Pennsylvania's Dover trial, which decided that intelligent design was a religious concept that should not be taught in public schools. He is also a popular speaker, offering the public a grass-…
clock | July 29, 2008We knew the web was big...
The Blogosphere Needs to Mature - But How?
Tracking Facebook's 2008 International Growth By Country
The Web's Dirty Little Secret
The Future of the Desktop
clock | July 29, 2008Progressive Blogosphere 2.0 - Why Social Justice Matters - Preview of Coming Attractions
Whither Progressive Blogosphere 2.0?
Becoming blog ecologists: PB2.0, consilience, and the Third Culture
clock | July 28, 2008Martin saw this comment of mine and sprung into action: Name the new 'Carnival of Scientific Life'!
The two big questions are what to call it, and how often to host it, so I'd like your input in the comments below please. I'll be making the final decision on August 1st.
What would be a good name for the carnival? (Ideally something without "carnival" in the title.)
Should it be held monthly, or at some other frequency?
The carnival is intended to cover all aspects of life as a scientist, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole,…
clock | July 28, 2008The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism:
The Kaiser Family Foundation is sponsoring a discussion about the growing influence of blogs on health news and policy debates. Only in the past few years has the blogosphere become mainstream. In the health policy arena, we now see policymakers, journalists, researchers and interest groups utilizing this new media tool to deliver information to their audiences. The briefing will highlight how the traditional health policy world has embraced blogging and will feature a keynote address by U.S. Department of Health and…
clock | July 28, 2008Lee Siegel was on NPR's On The Media the other day, defending his sockpuppetry and painting all bloggers as unwashed hordes of fascists. Boo hoo.
I listened to the podcast and it was too short to be of much substance. The interviewer has no idea how big of an offense sockpuppetry is, and Siegel demonstrated that, apart from comments on his own blog, he has never really taken a look at the blogosphere as a whole. If the comments on his posts are all he knows, he really knows nothing about blogs. The quip about editors who wink about nobody reading comments is just another proof how…