conferences

Jacqueline Floyd and Chris Rowan JF studied spreading centers off of Galapagos. When she did her PhD hard to get data â but she did ask for and get some, wrote a paper that ended up on the front page of Science. Now, data is widely available, but thereâs almost too much, so more effort is needed to organize and work with the data. Big science efforts such as the new OOI (see my workshop info) and Ridge2000 (3-d imaging terabytes, few scientists studying). Newish stuff: iphone seismometer, USGS twitter project to see where shaking is reported to try to find the center and the impact on the…
Anil Dash (first employee at SixApart (movabletype), long time blogger). Milestone â thereâs a blog on the White House website. Made statement that federal govât interest and use of new media â most interesting startup 2009. So then he set out to make it true. Govât picks experts, brings them in, listens to them for a bit in a closed door session, and then they go home. How can this be done more transparently using online tools. Expert Labs â part of AAAS.   ends up being really Govât bureaucracy has huge impact on science and technology innovation and use. Needs to be some translation.…
This is a session by Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo . They started with a bunch of questions. About half the room was librarians, of the others split between affiliated with an institution and not. Where do you go for full text? Google, Google Scholar. Does that work? Sometimes - if not quick if not free to me then move on. See if your state library has research databases - like NClive, iConn. Contact one of us and we'll put you in contact with someone local. Come ask your librarian if you need help with anything - even if they don't already provide that service, you help them with…
John Hogenesch, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology - Penn School of Med gene-at-a-time is giving way to genome wide - larger datasets, collaborative research last year more added to genebank than all previous years combined (wow!) - exceeds Moore's law. Academia responds by buying storage and clusters - but you need great IT staff - and it's really hard to get and keep them (they go to industry), heating & cooling, depreciation, usage/provisioning (under/over utilized). Larger inter-institutional grids - access is tightly regulated, they are very complex to program in/for Cloud computing…
part deux (actually this is the regular conference session) This is the session on Saturday morning at 9. Moderated by Deepak Singh (coast to coast bio) and Kiki Sanford. What is podcasting? audio or video plus subscription plus portability. Some of the podcasters have gone away from calling things podcasts â they call them âshowsâ. Deepakâs experience is different â theyâre only looking to talk about what theyâre interested in, which maybe 50 people are interested in. Heâs found that the conversation is better â have 1000 people listening a week. Theyâre not worried about doing it…
PalMD taught this workshop Friday, January 15. These are my quick notes. use an external mic â doesnât have to be that expensive, if you have multiple people in the room, you might want a 2 channel mic use audacity and plan to do a lot of editing find a place to host these things, he found that even with 30-40 downloads of a 30 minute podcast, his bandwidth charges would be really high, so he is hosting his on ScienceBlogs.com (I wonder if OurMedia.org is an option?) Need to save and then export to MP3 create an RSS file so people can find new entries â he manually edits one each time and…
We're just about set for a fabulous session on citation/bibliographic/reference managers at the upcoming Science Online conference. The session wiki page is here, so you can hop over there an add questions or suggestions if you'd like. John Dupuis and I are moderating and we'll have the following folks there talk about some of the most popular options: Kevin Emamy (CiteULike) Jason Hoyt (Mendeley) Trevor Owens (Zotero) Michael Habib (2Collab) John has a lot of experience with EndNote and we both have a lot of experience with RefWorks. The main point, though, is to have a great conversation…
I've been reading both geoblogs and women-in-science blogs for a while, and watching the support networks grow around them. So when I looked through the Geological Society of America's list of session topics for the 2009 annual meeting and saw one about "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention, and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences," I asked Anne Jefferson (who blogs with Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous) whether she would be interested in submitting an abstract with me. We didn't know whether blogs were really useful or not, though, so (with the help…
If you're like me, and you're currently not in San Francisco, listening to people discuss rapid coastal erosion in the Arctic or argue about whether or not an impact caused the Younger Dryas or show off cool imaging techniques to monitor active volcanoes... well, none of the geoscientists at Science Blogs is there, either. But there are plenty of other bloggers there. The American Geophysical Union has its own blog. It's staffed, not by AGU employees (for the most part), but by Science Communication grad students from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Columbia University. And…
From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ): Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org (I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ): Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org (I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
Blogging has been light of late because I was in the Houston area for the weekend, at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (think Phi Beta Kappa, but for science nerds). Every chapter is required to send a representative to the annual meeting at least once every three years, and as I'm the current president of the Union chapter, I got to go this year. In a lot of ways, the meeting was more Boskone than DAMOP, and I'm not just saying that because there were little ribbons for everybody's badges. This is an obvious consequence of the fact that it was mostly a…
No, I'm not going to AGU this year. But if you are, AGU has activities for bloggers. From Maria-José Viñas, AGU's public affairs coordinator: 1) We have scheduled a free geobloggers' lunch for Wednesday, from 12:30 to 1:30 PM at the San Francisco Marriott, Pacific H Room. Right now, it's just a socializing event -- no panel discussion has been arranged. Also, we might have a special guest speaker via videoconference, but we still have to confirm this event. Please RSVP for this lunch to mjvinas@agu.org by Tues. Dec 1. Feel free to let other geobloggers know about this event, but…
Thursday was a half day covering first the cyberinfrastructure and then some discussions of another system that can provide lessons learned to the RSN (reminder: regional scale nodes, the long cabled sensors). My notes are (of course) at work, but I'll reconstruct some of what I heard. I would recommend interested folks consult the final design document (oh no! it isn't where I found it the other day).  The CI is pretty complicated - in many places it's closer to the cutting edge of science than other parts of the enterprise. The complications include: openness, interactivity, quantities of…
And now for something completely different :) I am attending the Ocean Observatories Initiative Science Workshop in Baltimore. Today was the first day and there's a half day tomorrow. OOI is big science in its purest form.  It's multi-decade, multi-hundred million dollar facility for studying the ocean. In Europe, they have ESONET and in Japan, they have lots of similar projects, but DONET is probably the most similar. Canada has NEPTUNE. There are several parts to this thing: regional scale nodes (RSN), global scale nodes (GSN), coastal nodes, cyberinfrastructure (CI), and education/public…
On day three I only made two sessions - and the second was incredibly disappointing (I have serious problems with the study design) so I'll just briefly chat about the first, which was pretty awesome. Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory (II): Methods for the Study of Cyberinfrastructure (and Other Large Distributed Phenomena) This is a pretty big project that stretches over maybe about 10 schools. Christine Borgman is a/the lead for it. David Ribes talked about his work with a large hydrology project. It was interesting how the technical support folks had to negotiate the needs of both engineers…
Today was a little better. To be honest, itâs probably just that I was a bit more tolerant after I slept in a couple of hours before showing up in the middle of the second session. I started out in: Scientific Practices in Research and in Learning: Cyberinfrastructure Meets Cyberlearning chaired by Christine Borgman from UCLA.  I came in a little late, during Curtis Wongâs demo of Microsoftâs Worldwide Telescope â that thing is super cool. Seriously. It can display all sorts of data in layers and then link out to external information including stuff from ADS. After him, Alyssa Goodman of ADS…
It's always strange to go to a conference outside of your own primary research area. This conference had a lot of historians and philosophers as well as social scientists in every other category including media studies and information science.  I was in a couple sessions in which the presenter read from a marked up paper, clutched in their hands in a bundle.  I understand that's the norm in some fields, but there's no way I'm going to waste my time listening to someone read aloud when I could read the article for myself in half the time. There were some real highlights of the day.  A couple…
I hope to be blogging this meeting over the course of the next few days. Last STS meeting I attended computer note-taking was completely frowned upon but hopefully this one will be more modern.  I'll be talking tomorrow in session 070. Scientific Communication, (4:00 to 6:00 pm, but I'm guessing my 20 minutes will be closer to 6). The conference has oodles of concurrent sessions from 8am to 6pm and then evening events. I'm staying at home - probably an hour and a half away with traffic (30-45 minutes without) - so I might miss half of the first session and will not stay for evening events. I…
My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes-- but if the video feeds I've seen from other talks are an indication, it should be really good. The panel wound up being primarily about journalism, which is understable given that the other four participants are all very distinguished journalists. I did my best to uphold the honor of the New Media…