January 2013
1 post
Times change, people change: book reading and...
Somewhere I have a list of books I have read back in the 1990s or so, that I kept for a few years. It should exist as a Word document somewhere, on some old hard drive, probably unrecoverable any more… One of the mistakes I made initially was to place too strict criteria on which book I can add to the list - I decided I have to have read at least 90% of it, preferably 100%. But I don’t...
December 2012
6 posts
Rewriting Our Personal Narratives →
“….Why do we misremember things in certain ways? It’s a fascinating question. Looking back, we do not recall a steady, seamless flow of events in time. Instead our mind breaks the flow of time into related chunks and stores them as scenes and anecdotes and episodes. ….”
I keep going back and re-reading this. We all have stories we tell others - and ourselves - about...
Rewriting Our Personal Narratives →
“….Why do we misremember things in certain ways? It’s a fascinating question. Looking back, we do not recall a steady, seamless flow of events in time. Instead our mind breaks the flow of time into related chunks and stores them as scenes and anecdotes and episodes. ….”
I keep going back and re-reading this. We all have stories we tell others - and ourselves - about...
The changing world of gift-giving
Balkans people are a gregarious lot. And a generous lot. Kind of people who would take their shirts off their backs to give a stranger in need. Kind of people who’d kill the last chicken in order to feed a stranger. Anything less would be dishonorable. A different ethos… At least that’s the way I remember it. I left 21 years ago and much has changed there. Two decades...
Why "guns in Israel/Switzerland" argument is wrong
This article - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/mythbusting-israel-and-switzerland-are-not-gun-toting-utopias/ - is useful as a counter to your pro-gun friends who trot out the examples of Israel or Switzerland (or former Yugoslavia) as countries where everyone’s packing. As it states there, it’s not true. But there is more to it…. In those countries,...
Food/agriculture blogging is hard!
This elicited a thread of 106 comments on Facebook, and it’s still not over: https://www.facebook.com/coturnix/posts/10100984963412339 Over the past few years, I gradually acquired a feeling that Food is one of the most contentious, most poorly researched, and most atrociously reported issues in science, especially among those areas of science that affect us most directly, in our personal...
"Lincoln"
We saw “Lincoln” last night. I liked it a lot. Funny how quickly the Southern Strategy completely reversed what the two parties stand for and who gravitates to which one of them. Also impressed with the almost obsessive focus on accuracy of historical detail - from actual history, to set, costumes, etc. The only downer for me was General Lee’s horse Traveller who was supposed to...
November 2012
1 post
Election 2012 - what's next?
I am going to make a bold, wild prediction. After a couple of more election cycles (I would not be surprised if in four years, as things are moving fast these days, but more likely in eight or twelve), we will still have a two-party system. And one of those parties will still be the Democrats. But the other party will not be GOP. We will have to choose between the conservative party (Dems) and a...
August 2012
1 post
Cassie Rodenberg: In the Bronx, Rights Get Fuzzy →
cassierodenberg:
I’ve been working with photographer Chris Arnade to document stories in Hunts Point, Bronx and often-ignored areas of New York City. Over the course of the last year, we have noticed the impact the city’s Stop and Frisk policy has on the neighborhood. Recently, we made the decision to…
April 2012
3 posts
Miguel Nicolelis - Sigma Xi Pizza Lunch
Just a final reminder that at noon tomorrow, Tuesday, April 17, please come hear Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis talk about his fascinating research on direct brain control of prosthetics and machines. His talk is titled “Beyond Boundaries - The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines and How It Will Change Our Lives” and an abstract is below. Thanks to a grant from...
Attention: Calling All Science Teachers!
Allison and Susan here, two graduate students in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. This semester we’ve been expanding our journalism skills in a class that explores election coverage with the hope of getting to the heart of more citizen-oriented issues, rather than abrupt horse-race coverage. We have been lucky to partner with The Guardian US,...
April 24th Raleigh Science Cafe
Hi Café Enthusiasts, We are only about two weeks away from the grand opening of the Museum’s Nature Research Center! We are celebrating this event with a 24 hour opening starting at 5:00pm on April 20th and lasting until 5:00pm on Saturday the 21st. I hope that you all will be able to come get a sneak peek at our new building and to enjoy all of the music, food and exhibits we will have on the...
March 2012
4 posts
Knight News Challenge: Science Concierge:... →
Several proposals have more “Likes” and reblogs and comments than we do (though most have much fewer - there are almost a 1000 proposals, and most have no activity at all). They are closing on the midnight of March 29th (http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19681897769/news-challenge-on-networks-wants-your-likes-and-reblogs)so please Like and reblog (and comment on) our proposal:
...
Knight News Challenge: Science Concierge:... →
newschallenge:
1. What do you propose to do?
Develop Science Concierge microgrant program within our existing science hub to motivate more and better interaction with science.
2. Is anyone else doing something like this now, and how is your project different?
Our interconnected annual conference,…
March 20th Raleigh Science Cafe
Hi Café Enthusiasts, Few things spark the imagination more than learning about prehistoric times and about the animals that roamed the earth long before man. This month, join us for a dinosaur café and an interesting evening discussion about exciting new discoveries in paleontological research. Our March Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 3/20 at Tir Na Nog on South Blount...
Some About.Me pages
http://about.me/matthewhirschey http://about.me/ajebsary http://about.me/jtotheizzoe http://about.me/PerrinIreland http://about.me/jovana.miljanovic http://about.me/rascouet http://about.me/kmb http://about.me/b2bmaria http://about.me/rachaeldepp
February 2012
2 posts
Next Sigma Xi Pizza Lunch, Tues., Feb. 21.
Karl Wegmann is a geologist, not an archaeologist. But his and his colleagues’ analysis of the age of stone tools found on the island of Crete have challenged some very old ideas about when early humans first started using boats to get from one place to the next. Come here the NC State University professor discuss “Earthquake Hazards, Paleolithic Hominins and Stone Age...
This email made my day ;-)
Hi Bora: I just had to write and say hi….I handle PR for Tahiti Tourisme and your articles always come up in my Google alerts for Bora Bora. :) I feel like I know you! Cheers, Kristen
December 2011
1 post
Tentative 2012 event/travel calendar
February: February 23-24 - A public lecture and a social media workshop for faculty at UNC-Charlotte, NC: https://www.facebook.com/events/240435212709377/ March: March 3-10 - a series of talks in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, some at the University, some in the city. Organized by Marko Zivkovic (my brother, professor of anthropology), Marie-Claire Shanahan (professor of science education, also a NASW...
November 2011
2 posts
“ “Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all...”
– Stewart Brand, American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009 (via amiquote)
October 2011
5 posts
Here is a Human Being: next Sigma Xi pizza lunch
Misha Angrist is a geneticist and writer on the faculty at Duke University who in 2007 was the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome Project. Yep, his entire genome was sequenced and is now a public document. One thing that resulted is his 2010 book Here is a Human Being: At The Dawn of Personal Genomics. On noon on Tuesday, Oct. 25 come hear Angrist...
Quote and Comment: Fed up with weak reporting on... →
jayrosen:
See Robert David Graham, Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet
By reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statement, but I...
5 tags
The Story Collider: The Story Collider online... →
storycollider:
When Ben and Brian first started The Story Collider over a year ago, their goal – aside from putting on a kick-ass show, of course – was to make science real and relatable for everyone. To do that, they needed to get as many different voices as possible involved. They wanted the most…
September 2011
3 posts
del-fi: Open Access Is Infrastructure, Not... →
del-fi:
The advance of Open Access to the scholarly literature is pretty hard to miss at this point. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 7000 titles now, and the percentage of global articles that are OA is now somewhere above 10%. Revenues on OA journals are in the tens of millions…
July 2011
2 posts
Oransky's Thoughts That Won't Go Elsewhere:... →
ivanoransky:
My colleague Vincent Baby, riffing on a post about a new curation tool called Bundlr, tweeted that what the world needed was a new service called Mumblr. That has led to a number of other ideas, which I thought I’d gather here (in parens, the person who suggested the world-changing offering):
Bumblr, for beekeepers, dolts, or politicians (
Tentative travel calendar, Fall 2011
August 7-9th - NYC regular visit (#NYCscitweetup)
September 1-13th - Europe, including September 2-3rd – London, UK – Science Online London: http://www.scienceonlinelondon.org/
September 27-29th - NYC regular visit (#NYCscitweetup)
October4 - Durham NC, at Duke, talk by Michael Nielsen.
October 14-18th – Flagstaff AZ – CASW/NASW Science Writers 2011: http://www.sciencewriters2011.org/
...
June 2011
1 post
SocioScanner: Pre-Klout Social Media Metrics... →
socioscanner:
Part 1: Defining the Data for Top Influencers on Twitter
Opinion leaders, innovators, hubs, connectors and mavens – these are all titles that have been applied to influential individuals throughout the long history of research into how we affect the world-view of others. While research…
May 2011
3 posts
Testing Lulu.com embed code for book previews
Why do people mistakenly assume that blog posts...
I hear this all the time. Uttered as common-sensical, as something “everyone knows and is not in dispute”. Yet it is so wrong.
There is no such thing as “too long for a blog post” - bloggers never heard of the concept of “word limit”, so they often write very long posts.
My longest post is 30 pages long when printed out...
Floating duckies
Overshadowed by the Osama news, these four cool posts did not get sufficient attention, I am afraid. They are about ocean currents and what we learned about them by tracking (often through citizen scientists) floating plastic toys:
Slabs, Sneakers, Gyres and the Grotesque by Matthew Garcia.
Overboard: 28,000 toys and one man, lost at sea by Lindsey Hoshaw.
A True Duck Hunt: interview with...
March 2011
5 posts
The Open Laboratory 2010 is up for sale!
You kept submitting your posts all year long and watching, every Monday, to see which other posts were also entered.
Then we closed the submission form.
Then we made you wait a month of “electoral silence” while the judges went through three rounds of judging, until we finally announced which 50 essays, plus poems and cartoons, made it into print.
Then we announced the gorgeous new...
If you are an author of a scientific paper...
…this is how it’s done:
http://www.plosone.org/article/comments/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018011;jsessionid=C3D3D6F49824CC6B9A90724705F5B7B8.ambra02
How many science blogs are there?
If you asked me a few years ago, I could have given you an exact number. There were a couple of hundred bloggers, I knew them all, read them all, and knew each new one as they started. Today, there are thousands - nobody can keep up.
It is also harder to define what is a science blog, who is a blogger, and what is the act of blogging.
Some scientists blog about non-science topics, some ...
OK, is there a quick tutorial how Tumblr works?
Perhaps I should carefully re-read this:
http://jtotheizzoe.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/microblogging-for-science-ill-tumblr-for-ya/
Tumblr?
OK, let’s try this….
