Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
bioephemera | May 28, 2010
On Tuesday my friend John O, neuroscientist and social media outreach officer, gave a five-minute talk called "You've Been Scienced: Communicating Military Science and Technology with Social Media" at Gov 2.0 Expo 2010. Take my word for it: some things that seem obvious to researchers (like collaboration) aren't exactly routine in government bureaucracy. But the underlying message of this talk is really that blogging about science gets the public's attention - something all of us here at Sb can vouch for.
bioephemera | May 26, 2010Apparently the Republicans learned nothing from Change.gov and the White House's problematic experiments with crowdsourcing, because they've now invited web-based public input to shape their 2010 party platform. According to Dana Milbank, so far, the suggestions include such gems as "A 'teacher' told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish! And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story." Mmmmkay.
Unless the commenter uses a giveaway pseudonym, it's tough to tell if such…
bioephemera | May 22, 2010
From a post by Erin Fitzgerald, a DoD Science Policy Fellow who consulted on the design of Mattel's new "Computer Engineer Barbie:"
It might seem silly to get excited about a new Barbie doll. But, to me, she will help reinforce in math-loving little girls that they, like Barbie, can grow up to be computer engineers. It has been well documented that in recent years far fewer women are pursuing computer science degrees, so such role models are very important. What Computer Engineer Barbie will do, I think, is broaden the realm of not only what is possible, but what feels accessible--being…
bioephemera | May 14, 2010Want to see how Facebook's deafult settings have crept over time from mainly private to overwhelmingly public? Matt McKeon's got you covered with a very nice year-by-year data visualization. By 2010, the only things that aren't public are birthday and contract information. Was this what Zuckerberg had in mind years ago, when he said users were dumb ******s for sharing so much personal data with him? Hmmmm. . .
*yes, it's a pun. I do indeed sink so low, occasionally.
bioephemera | May 13, 2010I spent some time today chatting with Sam Bayard of the Citizen Media Law Project. It occurred to me that some of you who are newer to blogging might not know they have an invaluable database of articles on legal issues related to online publishing - a good resource to bookmark! (See, for example, "legal protections for anonymous speech".)
bioephemera | May 13, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette, a wonderful TED talk by Dan Meyer, high school math teacher, which is about so much more than math or education. It's about how we think about problems in the real world, how we handle ambiguity, and the problem with impatient problem-solving: "what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but paving a smooth, straight path from one to another, and congratulating our students for how they step over the cracks along the way".
In his words, Meyer "sells a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it." So he's…
bioephemera | May 6, 2010Civility: wow, everybody's concerned about it now! Here's our president a couple of days ago:
The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning -- since, after all, why should we listen to a "fascist," or a "socialist," or a "right-wing nut," or a left-wing nut"? It makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out. It robs us of a rational and serious debate, the one we need…
bioephemera | May 4, 2010
So much to read this week! Here are a couple of quick links of interest:
Carl Zimmer on comparing the E. coli genome to Linux code:
A number of scientists have begun to compare natural and manmade networks. A lot of the same rules appear to be at work in the growth of the Internet, airport connections, brain wiring, ecosystem food webs, and gene networks. But very often, scientists are finding, it's the differences between natural and manmade networks that are most revealing, offering clues to the different ways in which people and evolution build complex things.
And the NYT Magazine has an…
bioephemera | April 26, 2010
An urban art installation proposal by Nick Rodrigues would install sculpted pigeons in Cambridge, MA, each equipped with a "pico projector" that would project a live Tweet stream. According to the Artsake blog,
"Gossiping Birds" is a proposal by Nick Rodrigues (MCC Sculpture/Installation Fellow '07), one of ten artists chosen as finalists for a Public Art Commission in Cambridge, an initiative of the Cambridge Arts Council. The project called for site-specific public art proposals for the Cambridge Street Corridor, a one-mile stretch from Inman Square to Lechmere that spans three distinct…
bioephemera | April 23, 2010
FYI: I'll be appearing next Friday on a panel as part of the "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere" workshop sponsored by the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT. I'll be appearing with Chris Mooney of the Intersection/Discover on a panel called "Science and the Web."
Now, if you've read the blog for a while, you'll know I'm not a new media cheerleader. I do love new media, but I also have many concerns about its evolving mores. So in…
bioephemera | April 20, 2010I'm not going to comment too much on this, but this is hilariously wrong. I learned from this EFF post that the maker of the oft-parodied Hitler film The Downfall sent a bunch of takedown notices (or something similar using filtration technology) to YouTube, prompting removal of a swath of Hitler meltdown scene parodies.
Not only are many of these parodies clear cases of fair use, the parodies even included one by EFF's Brad Templeton,
"which depicted Hitler as a producer at Constantin Films. He hears about all the videos and orders DMCA takedowns. His lawyers (generals) have to explain…
bioephemera | April 19, 2010New Scibling Alex over at Myrmecos has a fun post on how to turn your iPhone into a close-focus insect camera. If you, too, have been frustrated with the quality of the iPhone's camera, you might want to check this out!
bioephemera | April 12, 2010
Reader Jake alerts me that Wired has just put up a gallery of robot spiders (and spider-like critters). If you've always wanted to be creeped out by a 40-foot robot Shelob, be my guest!
bioephemera | April 11, 2010Something I ran across by accident, while perusing our latest copy of Issues in Science and Technology: currently, the National Academies are sponsoring a Visual Culture and Evolution Online Symposium. It runs through Wednesday. What that means, apparently, is their panelists discuss the intersection of design, art, and culture with evolutionary biology concepts (sexual selection, genetics, adaptation, etc.) at a blog set up for the purpose.
The blog is basic (generic template), and a bit confusing. What seems to be happening is that panelists' ongoing contributions are folded into the posts…
bioephemera | April 10, 2010
I perversely love attending conferences where traditional journalists complain that bloggers are evil. :) Yesterday I heard that line again (in jest, relax) at a great discussion about changing media practices and the legal implications of various forms of content reuse, sponsored by the Online Media Legal Network. But the focus was a little bit different: are "new media" practices really that new? Historians know that almost two centuries ago, rival newspapers reprinted one another's content freely - often with snarky commentary, and nary a licensing fee or permission. Fact-checking fell by…
bioephemera | April 9, 2010
A very cool addition to the NLM "Turning the Pages" virtual library, which I blogged about back in December: the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus. You literally click and drag to unroll the papyrus, and then toggle the annotations on or off. While it doesn't have the pretty pictures that some of their other virtual manuscripts do (like Robert Hooke's Micrographia), it's pretty cool to unroll the world's oldest surviving surgical text, written in Egyptian script circa the 17th century BC.
(Alas, while my first instinct was "This would look so cool on the iPad," the website's in flash. Boo.)
bioephemera | April 8, 2010
While I was guest-posting over at Collective Imagination last month, I suggested that while better public access to peer reviewed research articles is a priority for the scientific community, knocking down firewalls may not be sufficient to help many patients, who lack the scientific background to plow through a Nature article. To get there, we may need efforts to provide plain language, accessible, searchable summaries of the research that clearly signpost the articles' relevance to patient needs. In addition to many interesting comments on the post, I got an email from the people behind…
bioephemera | April 6, 2010
So the word among my friends is that the iPad, which, as Stephen Fry noted, may be the closest thing humanity has yet produced to a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, might just be worth buying -- if only as a stunningly cool toy and not, alas, the tablet many of us wanted. For example, I give you TouchPress' ebook The Elements for iPad, by Theodore Grey:
As the first really new ebook developed from the ground up for iPad, The Elements beautifully shows off the capabilities of this lovely device. It is impossile to describe in words the experience of seeing and almost feeling over 500…
bioephemera | April 4, 2010Here's a pretty little visualization by Hybrid Medical Animation: a demo reel of clips portraying various physiological processes and medical devices in action, in various styles of animation:
hybrid 2010 reel from hybrid medical animation on Vimeo.
One of my frustrations with medical animations is that they're a Disneyfied look at the body. Real biology is dirty, sticky, unpredictable, and a little dangerous - kind of like Times Square used to be. But in medical animations the body is always a minimalist, sterile Kubrickian utopia, usually in Pottery Barn colors, where pretty little…
bioephemera | April 2, 2010
One of my fave April Fools' spoofs this week: Groupöupon, the high-end version of Groupon for the aesthetically pompous:
Make sure that your arms telegraph style and success with this indulgent line of Premium Sleeves designed by Fourth World, the designer brand renowned for combining the uncanny fashion sense of the first world's most impressive designers with the laser-like focus of third-world craftsmanship. Choose any of the extravagant materials from Fourth World's list, including ostrich neck, baleen, pressed toucan beak, snakeskin (heated), and mane. With each purchase, Fourth World…