My scientific specialty is chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism), with additional interests in comparative physiology, animal behavior and evolution. I am not an MD so I cannot diagnose and treat your sleep problems. As well as writing this blog, I am also the Online Discussion Expert for PLoS. This is a personal blog and opinions within it in no way reflect the policies of PLoS. You can contact me at: Coturnix@gmail.com
Almost a year ago, Nature published a set of opinion articles, including Science journalism: Toppling the priesthood by Toby Murcott. I did not react at the time, but JR Minkel and Jessica Palmer did and got some interesting responses in the comments. The article was brought to my attention by Gozde Zorlu who is ruminating on the same ideas and will have a blog post about it shortly (and I will let you know when it's up).
The article covers a lot of ground and has many layers. I finally read it and these are just some really quick thoughts, just to provoke discussion.....
First, Murcott is complaining about being essentially a lay-person outside of his own domain in biochemistry. That is true. Science reporters who don't have any scientific background are in an even worse shape - they definitely have a handicap, but not something they cannot overcome with years of study. But for this, they need to have the freedom to focus on only one area of science, e.g., Andy Revkin focusing on climate, Carl Zimmer on evolution, etc. I wrote a little bit about this before.
If you have spent some time in science before moving into journalism, you understand that years of total immersion in the field are necessary to fully understand it - I mean a narrow field! And not just the purely scientific information, but also historical, philosophical and social context, who-is-who in the field, relative strengths of various hypotheses, etc. You understand that it is impossible for a single person to gain a full understanding of every area of science.
- Can you play violin?
- Sure, of course
- Have you ever played?
- No. But it looks easy, I'm sure I can do it.
This is how non-scientists often think about science. This includes some journalists, until they get started on science reporting and realize that it's not as easy as it looks. But their editors do not grok it. Editors think of 'science' as a single thing - there is a sports-guy and a fashion-guy and a science-guy in the newsroom and they get assignments accordingly. Which means that the poor science reporter has to report on everything from cosmology to math to medicine to ecology with no time to actually study these areas sufficiently to understand them. Of course they get nervous and exhausted and touchy... ;-)
But in the era where newsrooms are firing in-house journalists and relying more and more on freelancers, this is an opportunity for freelance journalists to put a stake into a particular territory: specialize in one field and refuse to write stories outside it. That way, a journalist who has become, over years of study and reporting, an expert in field A, will only report on A, will be on rolodexes (I guess not virtual but real physical ones) of every editor in the country/world for stories on A and will be asked all the time by everyone to cover A. And will do it really well. Each editor will have a list of experts on A, B, C and every other area of science. With specialization, biochemists will not have to risk showing off their ignorance of astronomy, media organizations will know they have all topics covered by the best of the best, and the general quality of reporting science will increase.
In the next segment of the article, Murcott seems to want more investigative science journalism. But, compare this to this. Connie St.Louis and I have the opposite ideas what science journalism is. I am not specifically targeting Connie, it just happens that I am aware of her post that puts into words, very clearly, what many other journalists say or at least hint at.
Everything that I think is science journalism, she dismisses as not being 'real' science journalism: science reportage and explaining. And one aspect of it that she thinks is the real science journalism is the only one I think is really not - "investigative science journalism" is, in my book, just the regular investigative journalism in which the people under scrutiny just happen accidentally to be scientists. The former (science reporting and explaining) requires that the journalist understands science, the latter (investigating potential misconduct by people who happen to be scientists) does not. As I said before, if the investigation involves analysis of data, it is done by scientists and reported in specialized media: scientific journals (these can be then translated into lay language by journalists and reported to the general audience). If the investigation involves potential misconduct of humans who happen to be scientists, it is done by journalists, but it is not science journalism any more - it is more something like political journalism (as misconduct usually involves money and prestige).
Steve Mirsky (editor at Scientific American: here on Twitter ) once said, and I agree with him, that all of science journalism should be activist: evangelizing for truth (not capitalized). There is no mealy-mouthed HeSaidSheSaid, False-Balance, View-From-Nowhere tabulation of opinions held by people. Science journalism is straightforward: this is how the world works and this is how we learned it.
Which brings me to another important question: why professional journalists dismiss Press Information Officers. If journalists think that journalism that investigates scientists is what should be called 'science journalism', and see that what PIOs are doing is not that, they will not think of PIOs as journalists. On the other hand, if you agree with me that investigation of scientists is not science journalism, but reporting and explaining science is, than PIOs, many of whom have science degrees, are actually doing the brunt of science journalism these days. Sure, not all of them are perfect, and not all press releases are good, but they are getting better (as science majors are replacing j-school majors as PIOs at many institutions), they are, seeing how media is crumbling, starting to see themselves as serious journalists filling the void left by the massive layoffs of science reporters in the MSM, and are writing better and better copy, usually much better than what remaining newsroom reporters write under horrendous deadlines and pressure.
In other words, as we realize that scientists, PIOs, journalists and audience are in it together, collaborating on science reporting, we need to eliminate this antagonism between newsroom journalists and institutional journalists (formerly known as PIOs). For that antagonism to be eliminated, the two need to agree on what the definition of science journalism is. And I don't think defining it as 'investigating potential misconduct of scientists' is a good and healthy definition. It is much more productive to leave that kind of stuff to political reporters (who will be tipped off by scientists themselves, as was always the case: all data-fudging was first discovered by other scientists, the only people with expertise to notice it in the first place) and have everyone focus on real science journalism - reporting and explaining science.
Next, Murcott wants to move science journalism from a) presenting facts (including results of latest studies), to b) presenting how scientists work and their method. He, and many others, forget that the key element is the third level: c) trust. Read this carefully to understand why. So, all three things need to be reported. Eyeing every paper and every press release as suspect, and treating scientists as dishonest until proven otherwise, is one of the journalistic techniques that undermines the trust in science. Whose side are you on, guys? Creationist, GW-denialists, HIV-denialists and anti-vaccers? Job of a journalist is to explain the world as it is. Science is the best method to figure out how the world works. Use this method as a journalistic method.
Scientific method has several (actually many) elements in phases, but one can oversimplify here: get an idea, test it, communicate it. Yes, communicating science is a part of scientific method. Which is why both scientists and journalists have to do it, hopefully together as allies, not as opponents eyeing each other with suspicion. See also many of the reports from scio10 - almost all of them focus on the need for collaboration between scientists, press officers and journalists, not antagonism. It's a new ecosystem today. And the new niche for science journalists is NOT the top predator any more - the mindset has to shift from the competitive to a collaborative view of media ecology.
Finally, we get to Murcott's wish to see reviews....the reviews that scientists have written during the process of peer-review of manuscripts. Murcott, pressed for time, thinks that being able, as a journalist, to see the reviews, would help him understand the story better and glean some of the context that he is missing because is writing a story outside of his area of expertise and has not time to study it first. In essence, he is asking for a shortcut that helps him do his job. But he is not considering how this would affect the review process.
First, it is important to remind everyone that peer-review is a very new thing. Only one minor paper by Einstein went through peer-review. Nature only started experimenting with it in the late 1960s. Yet lots and lots of great science was published before this was instituted. There is no data supporting the view that peer-review actually does much good.
We at PLoS ONE are trying to improve the process. What we have noticed (and most of our academic editors and authors agree) is that by eliminating the need for reviewers to evaluate if a manuscript is novel, exciting, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, mind-boggling and Earth-shaking, and only asking them to evaluate the technical aspects of the work, the review becomes MUCH better:
You can search the Web for many discussions of "open review" and you will see that there are many more cons than pros. The reviewers will find it difficult to be frank. Fewer people will agree to review (and there is already too many manuscripts for the available number of reviewers). Showing reviews to journalists would have exactly the same effect, for good or ill. Having a journalist see reviews is ...a crutch for a journo who does not have the time, or expertise, or inclination to do the heavy lifting of personal education and everybody would object to this, rightly so. Specialization of journalists - each grabbing one's own area of expertise - and the collaborative journalism done by scientists, PIOs, journalists and audience, would make a 'peek' at reviewers' comments unnecessary and irrelevant. The collective WILL have all the necessary expertise and historical/philosophical/sociological/theoretical/methodological context to get the story (and attached data/information) right.
Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?
There are 35 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Yet, the overall effects of fragmentation on biodiversity may be obscured by differences in responses among species. These opposing responses to fragmentation may be manifest in higher variability in species richness and abundance (termed hyperdynamism), and in predictable changes in community composition. We tested whether forest fragmentation causes long-term hyperdynamism in butterfly communities, a taxon that naturally displays large variations in species richness and community composition. Using a dataset from an experimentally fragmented landscape in the central Amazon that spanned 11 years, we evaluated the effect of fragmentation on changes in species richness and community composition through time. Overall, adjusted species richness (adjusted for survey duration) did not differ between fragmented forest and intact forest. However, spatial and temporal variation of adjusted species richness was significantly higher in fragmented forests relative to intact forest. This variation was associated with changes in butterfly community composition, specifically lower proportions of understory shade species and higher proportions of edge species in fragmented forest. Analysis of rarefied species richness, estimated using indices of butterfly abundance, showed no differences between fragmented and intact forest plots in spatial or temporal variation. These results do not contradict the results from adjusted species richness, but rather suggest that higher variability in butterfly adjusted species richness may be explained by changes in butterfly abundance. Combined, these results indicate that butterfly communities in fragmented tropical forests are more variable than in intact forest, and that the natural variability of butterflies was not a buffer against the effects of fragmentation on community dynamics.
Despite an Indo-Pacific wide distribution, the movement patterns of grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) and fidelity to individual reef platforms has gone largely unstudied. Their wide distribution implies that some individuals have dispersed throughout tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific, but data on large-scale movements do not exist. We present data from nine C. amblyrhynchos monitored within the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea off the coast of Australia. Shark presence and movements were monitored via an array of acoustic receivers for a period of six months in 2008. During the course of this monitoring few individuals showed fidelity to an individual reef suggesting that current protective areas have limited utility for this species. One individual undertook a large-scale movement (134 km) between the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef, providing the first evidence of direct linkage of C. amblyrhynchos populations between these two regions. Results indicate limited reef fidelity and evidence of large-scale movements within northern Australian waters.
Despite important recent progress in our understanding of brain evolution, controversy remains regarding the evolutionary forces that have driven its enormous diversification in size. Here, we report that in passerine birds, migratory species tend to have brains that are substantially smaller (relative to body size) than those of resident species, confirming and generalizing previous studies. Phylogenetic reconstructions based on Bayesian Markov chain methods suggest an evolutionary scenario in which some large brained tropical passerines that invaded more seasonal regions evolved migratory behavior and migration itself selected for smaller brain size. Selection for smaller brains in migratory birds may arise from the energetic and developmental costs associated with a highly mobile life cycle, a possibility that is supported by a path analysis. Nevertheless, an important fraction (over 68%) of the correlation between brain mass and migratory distance comes from a direct effect of migration on brain size, perhaps reflecting costs associated with cognitive functions that have become less necessary in migratory species. Overall, our results highlight the importance of retrospective analyses in identifying selective pressures that have shaped brain evolution, and indicate that when it comes to the brain, larger is not always better.
We recently used computational phylogenetic methods on lexical data to test between two scenarios for the peopling of the Pacific. Our analyses of lexical data supported a pulse-pause scenario of Pacific settlement in which the Austronesian speakers originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago and rapidly spread through the Pacific in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses. We claimed that there was high congruence between traditional language subgroups and those observed in the language phylogenies, and that the estimated age of the Austronesian expansion at 5,200 years ago was consistent with the archaeological evidence. However, the congruence between the language phylogenies and the evidence from historical linguistics was not quantitatively assessed using tree comparison metrics. The robustness of the divergence time estimates to different calibration points was also not investigated exhaustively. Here we address these limitations by using a systematic tree comparison metric to calculate the similarity between the Bayesian phylogenetic trees and the subgroups proposed by historical linguistics, and by re-estimating the age of the Austronesian expansion using only the most robust calibrations. The results show that the Austronesian language phylogenies are highly congruent with the traditional subgroupings, and the date estimates are robust even when calculated using a restricted set of historical calibrations.
A systematic review was conducted for the association between animal feeding operations (AFOs) and the health of individuals living near AFOs. The review was restricted to studies reporting respiratory, gastrointestinal and mental health outcomes in individuals living near AFOs in North America, European Union, United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. From June to September 2008 searches were conducted in PUBMED, CAB, Web-of-Science, and Agricola with no restrictions. Hand searching of narrative reviews was also used. Two reviewers independently evaluated the role of chance, confounding, information, selection and analytic bias on the study outcome. Nine relevant studies were identified. The studies were heterogeneous with respect to outcomes and exposures assessed. Few studies reported an association between surrogate clinical outcomes and AFO proximity. A negative association was reported when odor was the measure of exposure to AFOs and self-reported disease, the measure of outcome. There was evidence of an association between self-reported disease and proximity to AFO in individuals annoyed by AFO odor. There was inconsistent evidence of a weak association between self-reported disease in people with allergies or familial history of allergies. No consistent dose response relationship between exposure and disease was observable.
Organisms, at scales ranging from unicellular to mammals, have been known to exhibit foraging behavior described by random walks whose segments confirm to Lévy or exponential distributions. For the first time, we present evidence that single cells (mammary epithelial cells) that exist in multi-cellular organisms (humans) follow a bimodal correlated random walk (BCRW). Cellular tracks of MCF-10A pBabe, neuN and neuT random migration on 2-D plastic substrates, analyzed using bimodal analysis, were found to reveal the BCRW pattern. We find two types of exponentially distributed correlated flights (corresponding to what we refer to as the directional and re-orientation phases) each having its own correlation between move step-lengths within flights. The exponential distribution of flight lengths was confirmed using different analysis methods (logarithmic binning with normalization, survival frequency plots and maximum likelihood estimation). Because of the presence of non-uniform turn angle distribution of move step-lengths within a flight and two different types of flights, we propose that the epithelial random walk is a BCRW comprising of two alternating modes with varying degree of correlations, rather than a simple persistent random walk. A BCRW model rather than a simple persistent random walk correctly matches the super-diffusivity in the cell migration paths as indicated by simulations based on the BCRW model.
The domestic dog, Canis familiaris, exhibits profound phenotypic diversity and is an ideal model organism for the genetic dissection of simple and complex traits. However, some of the most interesting phenotypes are fixed in particular breeds and are therefore less tractable to genetic analysis using classical segregation-based mapping approaches. We implemented an across breed mapping approach using a moderately dense SNP array, a low number of animals and breeds carefully selected for the phenotypes of interest to identify genetic variants responsible for breed-defining characteristics. Using a modest number of affected (10-30) and control (20-60) samples from multiple breeds, the correct chromosomal assignment was identified in a proof of concept experiment using three previously defined loci; hyperuricosuria, white spotting and chondrodysplasia. Genome-wide association was performed in a similar manner for one of the most striking morphological traits in dogs: brachycephalic head type. Although candidate gene approaches based on comparable phenotypes in mice and humans have been utilized for this trait, the causative gene has remained elusive using this method. Samples from nine affected breeds and thirteen control breeds identified strong genome-wide associations for brachycephalic head type on Cfa 1. Two independent datasets identified the same genomic region. Levels of relative heterozygosity in the associated region indicate that it has been subjected to a selective sweep, consistent with it being a breed defining morphological characteristic. Genotyping additional dogs in the region confirmed the association. To date, the genetic structure of dog breeds has primarily been exploited for genome wide association for segregating traits. These results demonstrate that non-segregating traits under strong selection are equally tractable to genetic analysis using small sample numbers.
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Christine Ottery from the MA program in science journalism at City University London to answer a few questions:
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Does double As at GCSE count as a science background? Leaving aside exams I took when I was 15 years old, I'm a humanities graduate, with a BA in Philosophy and English. As such, my philosophy is that it's useful to build our pyramids of knowledge from the bottom up using facts as the foundation. Or, like a game of Jenga gone wrong, we could fall down.
My particular intrigue with science is its potential to explain why humans behave the way they do. The fields of neuroscience, genetics and psychology are all fascinating. I'm concerned with the way these interact with big questions such as climate change, health and feminism to the banal and beautiful in our daily lives.
This is starting to sound like a manifesto! Ahem, moving on.
(By the way, I'm from London, England.)
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
In my previous incarnation I was a journalist and editor writing about adventure travel and sports. I felt pretty good about encouraging people to take up a more active lifestyle. A sedentary lifestyle isn't all to good for health. Read Travis Saunder's take on the effects of being a couch potato.
So, although I planned and commissioned health writing, I did very little myself. The first proper piece of science writing I did was a piece for Fall-Line Skiing magazine on the science of powder snow.
Last summer, around the same time as I was applying to go back to school to do an MA in science journalism at City University London, I began to write long blogs on science communication and tweet like a creature possessed . Then all kinds of funny things happened. I was asked to write for Comment is Free in the Guardian online, and invited to come and speak at Science Online 2010 (Wooo-hooo!). I became a researcher for my journalistic hero, George Monbiot, started writing for TheEcologist.co.uk and even penned a piece about bonobos for Newscientist.com.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The two main things that I'm fired up by at the moment are: the mega-inspirational green heroes research I'm doing for Monbiot and a website I'm launching to address science in women's magazines - can't wait to get my teeth into that one. For the site I will be looking at how science features in women's mags and comparing it to what readers want. After all, women are the ones who make the majority of consumer decisions - possibly on the basis of dodgy science. As an antidote, I'll also be research blogging.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science videos on the web going viral is the way forward for science communication, and no, I'm not just talking about the ubiquitous duck's penis. Brain surgery, historical experiments and so on are a good way of reeling people into science. Complex scientific concepts can be more easily understood when they are demonstrated.
How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Twitter and Facebook are important, but mostly as a way to skim off the cream of what other people are reading and writing about. Twitter, in particular, can be a veritable fount of story ideas, especially for blogposts. When people start chatting about something on Twitter, depending on how I rate their opinions, I sit up and take notice. In fact, can we come up with a formula for that? Who'll take a bribe of half a flapjack and lukewarm mug of tea?
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Before coming to Science Online, I have to confess to only having properly read a small handful of science blogs: Bora's of course, Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science and some of Scicurious's posts on Neurotopia. Since then, I've acquainted myself with: Janet Stemwedel's Adventures in Ethics and Science, Brian Switek's Laelaps, and Eric Michael Johnson's The Primate Diaries, and checked out a whole lot more.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I wrote about my impressions from Science Online 2010 on my blog. Since then, the stuff I'm rolling around my mind basically consists of the meme: I'm writing about what I'm passionate about. Now how do I make enough money from it? So the most important session for me, as stand-alone thought-provoking stuff and also because of the conversations that arose with DeLene Beeland, was: Rebecca Skloot, Tom Levenson and Brian Switek on how to go from blog to book.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
The Online News Association organizes a meeting every year (and gives Online Journalism Awards there). The next one will be in October 28-30, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
The program is formed by the online news community submitting proposals, then everyone else voting the proposals up or down. I guess that the organizers also have some say in it (especially if the voting produces a horrible gender imbalance - easy to happen with so many proposals put forward by men).
The proposals are now all up online and ready for your votes - you need to register (they have to avoid spammers, robots, automated votes, multiple votes from individuals, etc.) which is easy and quick, then start clicking on thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons on each session. There are some cool sessions/panels proposed there, e.g., by Andria Krewson and by Jay Rosen + Dave Winer., to name just a couple. In case of panels, you will only see the name of the person who proposed the panel, not the names of people who would be panelists, as it is not yet known for many of them if they may or may not be able to make the panel.
At the last minute, prompted by friends, I put my proposal into the hat:
At the time when so many policy decisions rely on science and when science newsrooms are cut to the bone, scientists, bloggers, press information officers and freelance journalists are starting to work together to provide accurate and timely scientific information online. We'll discuss the forms of such collaborations and show some examples.
I hope you vote my session up (and post supporting comments if so inclined - these may sway the organizers). If my proposal gets included, I will be able to contact potential panelists and then announce their names once they say Yes. The competition is tough and some of these people (many of them, in fact) have much larger pools of audience on their platforms and in social media than I do, so I need your help: vote and ask your friends to vote as well.
Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?
There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Go say Hello to Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski, the newest bloggers on the Scienceblogs.com network at Obesity Panacea.
They cover health, physiology, nutrition and exercise - something we did not have here on the network before, at least not in such a concentrated form. Check out the archives of their old blog and then bookmark the new Obesity Panacea.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Robin Ann Smith from NESCent to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I've spent much of my life taking a grand tour of southern cities -- born in New Orleans, raised in Atlanta, and schooled in Nashville. My Midwestern mother says that makes me and my sister g.r.i.t.s: Girls Raised in the South. My paternal grandmother grew up in Cajun village in south Louisiana and inspired me to study French, so I lived in France for two years during and after college. I moved to North Carolina in 1999.
Scientific background? I have a PhD in biology from Duke, where I studied plant ecology and evolution. Ask me about the mating habits of morning glories and I'll give you an earful. Before that I did Master's work at the University of Montpellier in France, mostly on how different mixes of plants rebound from disturbances like fire and grazing. While there I also learned to love things like tripe, cheek kisses, and strong coffee.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I'm a science writer at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a nonprofit biology research center based in Durham, NC. NESCent is building their newsroom. That's where I come in -- my job is to help communicate some of research that comes out of the Center.
Before that I taught undergraduate writing for four years at Duke. There are several university writing programs around the country that recruit recently-minted PhDs from across the sciences and humanities to design and teach writing classes in their field. For people who want to learn more about teaching and writing it's a wonderful opportunity. More science PhDs should apply.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As a staff writer for a research center I handle a wide range of writing assignments. In a given week I may write a news release, a story for our newsletter or website, a project proposal, or text for a talk or brochure. I also interview researchers, read journal articles, and attend talks and conferences to find out about research in the pipeline.
My goals? I'd like to learn how to tell stories using images and audio. I recently signed up for classes in graphic design and digital photography. I also want to keep flexing my freelance muscles via non-work related stories. In my spare time you can find me hiking, dancing, or experimenting with frozen desserts and home plumbing projects.
How do social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook figure in your work? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I was skeptical about Twitter until I started using it. It's a news aggregator, for one. I use it to find the latest stories about a range of topics. Twitter has also been great for tapping into a universe of writers and editors and getting to know their interests. As for the cons? Between Twitter, Facebook, email, and a million other online outlets, some days my laptop feels like my external brain. I need to unplug and get outside. Time management is tricky.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs by following traditional writers and journalists who expanded into blogging. Olivia Judson's blog The Wild Side (now a subset of Opinionator) and Carl Zimmer's blog The Loom are great examples. I recently discovered and have gotten a huge kick out of CreatureCast, a blog and podcast series jam-packed with playful videos, animation, music and original artwork about animals. Not all of my favorites are bloggers per se, but I'm also a huge fan of Susan Milius at Science News magazine for her coverage of the plant world.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
What stood out for me was the diversity of people there - researchers and writers mingling with artists, editors, librarians and educators. That's definitely one of the things that distinguishes Science Online from other science or writing conferences I've been to. My one suggestion for next year: we need a bigger room for the pitch slam! I love that session.
Thanks, Bora.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I'll see you around.
As you may know, I love the Journal of Science Communication. It publishes some very interesting and useful scholarly articles on a wide array of issues pertaining to the communication, education and publishing of science. I wish more science bloggers (and non-blogging scientists) read it and blogged about their articles. Unfortunately, human nature being as it is, most of the excellent papers go by un-noticed by the blogosphere, while an occasional sub-standard paper gets some play - it is so much easier to critique than to analyze or even praise.
One such paper is now making the rounds - it is mentioned on Science of the Invisible and discussed at length (not badly, mind you) on The Scholarly Kitchen. The article in question is Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities, Journal of Science Communication, 9 (1), March 2010, by Inna Kouper, a graduate student in library and information science at Indiana University. The journal is Open Access and this article is now published so you can download the free PDF with a single click. Go for it, you'll need it if you want to read along with me.
First, let me get the Conflict Of Interest out of the way. I am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication. I helped the journal find reviewers for this particular manuscript. And I have reviewed it myself. Wanting to see this journal be the best it can be, I was somewhat dismayed that the paper was published despite not being revised in any way that reflects a response to any of my criticisms I voiced in my review.
So, let me walk you through the big chunks of the paper, adding the critiques that I voiced during the review process. I will have additional commentary at the end of the post as well.
Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are novelty tools that can be used to facilitate broader involvement of citizens in the discussions about science. The same tools can be used to reinforce the traditional top-down model of science communication. Empirical investigations of particular technologies can help to understand how these tools are used in the dissemination of information and knowledge as well as stimulate a dialog about better models and practices of science communication.
With the Internet being over 26 years old, the World Wide Web 19 years, and blogs 12 years, I don't think it is correct to still, at this day and age, call ICTs "novel".
This study focuses on one of the ICTs that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of content and comments on eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.
Analysis of blogs has been done before, so this article needs to focus on what new it brings to the literature - the analysis of comments.
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So far the discussion about science blogs develops primarily in the form of journalistic and scholarly commentary rather than research-based analysis. It focuses on what blogs can and cannot do and why blogging can be a promising tool for scientists (Butler, 2005). Most often the analysis relies on a few examples of science blogging and uses these examples to contextualize general considerations and descriptions (Wilkins, 2008). To better understand challenges and opportunities science blogs can bring, it is necessary to analyze current practices of science blogging. To date no attempts have been made to do that. The present study is the first step in this direction.
Together with Wilkins 2008, this paragraph should also probably cite Goldstein 2009 which did a similar analysis (including even some of the same blogs as used in this paper). This paragraph should also accentuate the analysis of comments to differentiate it from other papers that have analyzed blog posts alone.
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The data for this study consist of posts and comments from eleven blogs that write about science and technology. The blogs were sampled via the Internet search for "science blogs" and "blogs about science" and by following scientific news on the moment of data collection in Spring, 2008. Below is the list of blogs with their titles and URLs from which the posts and comments were sampled:
This needs to be clarified. Internet search for "science blogs" and "blogs about science" brings up thousands of blogs (some of which are not science blogs at all). How were these particular 11 chosen? What search method was used: Google Blogsearch, Google Web Search, Technorati, other?
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This is an interesting collection (see the Table). It is, first, very small, thus missing some important subsets of the science blogosphere (medblogs, nature blogs, skeptical blogs and, importantly due to cluster analysis by Christina Pikas, the female science bloggers which have a very different pattern of both posts and comments). All or most of the authors of these 11 blogs are white males, which also affects the analysis. A number of these blogs are multi-author, with each author having a different style and blogging mode (Note: the Table was modified for publication, adding the number of authors per blog, but no discussion of the importance of this appeared in the text). Please note here, up front, the potential drawbacks of your sampling methods.
Before sampling blogs were examined for posting activity. As it was determined that some blogs posted one or two messages per week and others posted several messages per day, it was decided to save 30 days of activity from less active blogs and five days of activity from very active blogs. For feasibility of qualitative analysis, the number of comments was limited to 15 comments per post. Overall, 174 posts and 1409 comments from 11 blogs were saved and analyzed.
Please justify the cut-off at 15 comments. On busy blogs like Pharyngula, the first 15 comments are likely to be quick one-liners while deeper discussions happen later, once readers had sufficient time to read and digest the content of the post, often with long, well-informed comment threads that go on for hundreds of comments per post.
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The findings suggest that science blogs are too heterogeneous to be understood as an emerging genre of science communication. The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation. Some bloggers emphasized the first person perspective and presented themselves through religious and political affiliation (e.g., "The blog is about whatever we find interesting" at Cosmic Variance or "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal" at Pharyngula). Others shifted the focus from their personalities to the content and featured more neutral forms of presentation (e.g., "... the latest news about microbiology" at MycrobiologyBytes or "... your source for news and commentary on science" at The Scientific Activist). Differences in sources, topics, and modes of participation among blogs are discussed below.
The small and thematically narrow sample of blogs limits the value of this paragraph. What is in an "About Us" section may have been written years ago and never revisited although a blog has evolved in a different direction in the meantime?
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Personal experience and news from other media were used to discuss predominantly non-scientific, often political, matters. Thus, the blog authors commented on the issues of sports doping (Pure Pedantry), children's medical care and religion (BioEthics), creationism versus evolution disputes (Panda's Thumb), US presidential elections (The Scientific Activist), and the life of the former Serbian president Radovan Karadzic (Cosmic Variance). Other examples of using experienced events as sources of blog posts included reporting about conferences and public lectures, commemorating events from the past, or noticing the appearance of new material on the web.
Radovan Karadzic was never any kind of official in Serbia. Before the unification of Bosnia, during the war, he was the president of the self-proclaimed enclave of Bosnian Serbs called Republika Srpska which was never, officially or unofficially, a part of Serbia proper.
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As can be seen from the figure above, science blogs cover a variety of issues and topics beyond science. Among the topics related to science the most frequently covered topics were evolution, health, and space. The prominence of the topics of evolution and creationism can be explained by the dominance of two highly prolific blogs Pharyngula and Panda's Thumb, which consider the promotion of evolutionary theory as their main focus. Among other scientific topics bloggers discussed genetics, physics, and biotechnology. More often, though, science bloggers discussed what has been posted on other blogs and websites and reflected on the practices in academia, on their and others' blogging, and on the issues of their personal life.
The range of topics seen suffers from the small sample of blogs. A different sample (e.g,. if all the blogs were sampled from Nature Network) would result in a completely different word cloud.
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Each larger group of participation modes was equally noticeable in the sample, therefore it is difficult to claim that one form of communication or the other is more common for science blogs. Being a more fluid and personal genre of communication, blogs allow for greater variability of expression, and it seems that the authors of science blogs eagerly utilize this fluidity and variability. It was observed though, that certain blogs favored one mode of participation more than others.
Do you have numbers, percentages? Can you provide a complete dataset of raw data so others can reanalyze?
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The writer of this post freely interpreted the findings of the study and substituted alcohol-containing nectar mentioned in the original research with beer. This way the news becomes more entertaining, yet it may prevent the readers from getting accurate information and forming their own opinion, thereby making it difficult to rely on this form of reporting as a source of accurate information.
Potential explanation: Wired Science blog is an official blog of a magazine and most Wired bloggers are trained journalists - this may explain a number of differences seen between Wired Science and other blogs.
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"Antimatter is just like ordinary matter in every way, except that every quantity you can think of (apart from mass and spin), is reversed. As an example, the electron is a particle with a specific mass and carrying a specific amount of negative electric charge. The antiparticle of the electron is a positron, which has the identical mass to an electron, but precisely the opposite charge. The thing about particles and their antiparticles is that, if one puts them together, the net value of any quantity (called a quantum number by physicists) carried by the pair of them is zero. Therefore, a particle and an antiparticle together are merely mass which, thanks to Einstein's E=mc2, can be converted entirely into energy. As a result of this, when matter and antimatter come together, they annihilate, producing energy in the form of light (photons)."
As you note later, most readers are scientists. Physicist tend to read physics blogs. Thus, the author has correctly identified his audience and is writing at the level expected from his audience. Other posts on the same blog may be more directed towards lay audience. Also, John Wilkins has collected a large number of 'Basics Posts' written specifically for lay audience by a large number of science bloggers over a period of almost two years.
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Emotional and often insulting evaluations are very common for this and some other blogs that seem to be eager to demonstrate not only their rightness, but also to distinguish their group of reasonable and worthy individuals from others, who are wrong, unintelligent, and overall worthless. The frequency of such evaluations and mockery undermines the goals of rational debate and criticism. Such activities can foster solidarity among the like-minded individuals, yet at the same time, they may spur hostility in those who are undecided or hold a different opinion.
This statement (last 2 sentences) is often repeated but has never been studied and does not have, thus, empirical support. While alienation of the 'opposing side' is likely, it does not make a difference as the 'opposing side' is regarded as 'unmoveable' and is not the target audience. The undecided, on the other hand are a big unknown and there are some indications that they are likely NOT to want to join the side that is mocked.
Less complicated common forms of author participation in science blogs included announcements and summaries of documents. Announcements publicize events and sources of information (e.g., "The Kaiser network is hosting a live webcast to discuss the influence of the blogosphere on health policy" or "Tonight, on the History Channel... It's the much anticipate first episode of a new series, Evolve - Eyes"). Summaries provide elaborate descriptions of research papers and essays and often use very specific terminology such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which would require the reader to have some background in a particular field. While such summaries somewhat popularize the content of research papers, the amount of minimal background necessary for a lay person to understand and follow the research news varied among different science blogs.
Most bloggers write for their own amusement and not with a specific goal of popularization of science, and, after a while, tend to adapt to what their audience actually is. Thus, a knowledgeable audience will result in further posts being written at their level of interest and understanding.
Readers of science blogs also had some relationship with science, i.e., they were not exactly non-scientists or lay persons. One author posted a message titled "Who are you?" and asked his readers for information about themselves and their background. The answers to this post as well as the overall analysis of readers' comments demonstrate that the readers are almost always associated with science one way or another. They are graduate students, postdoctoral associates, faculty members, and researchers from a variety of scientific and research fields including biology, physics, neuroscience, and medicine. Wired Science was probably the only blog in the sample where non-scientists formed a considerable portion of the audience. Nevertheless, even in this blog commenters often took the position of authority and talked as experts who are quite knowledgeable about the subject.
Remember again that Wired bloggers are journalists.
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After this comment a thread of comments developed defending or criticizing Barack Obama and his approach to science, religion, politics, and so on. These comments were completely unrelated to the topic of Louisiana creationism law provided by the blog post.
It is important to note the history of these blogs. Wired Science is a blog owned by a media company. Media in general, due to a bad case of misreading of an old legal case, tend not to moderate their comments. Unmoderated comment threads tend to get unruly and attract trolls and hit-and-run comments. Panda's Thumb evolved out of an old Usenet group, where the conduct is traditionally different than on modern blogs. This is also a group blog with minimal moderation. Pure Pedantry was a relatively small blog, but a Britney Spears post got on digg.com and most of the comments they got after that are one-time hit-and-run visitors from Google searches, not the regular commenting community of the blog. On the other hand, Pharyngula is a carefully moderated blog - community votes for the Commenter of the Month (the "Molly") to reward intelligent contribution and PZ Myers has over time banned several disruptive commenters (whose names are listed on his blog, as example). He will sometimes personally interfere - by deleting and by commenting himself - if someone is disruptive. As a result, Pharyngula is a community of commenters. They tend to talk to each other much more than to Myers. To some extent, but not as much as on Pharyngula, commenters on Panda's Thumb, Cosmic Variance and perhaps Wired Science, may be seen more as a community that talks among themselves than commenters addressing the owner of the blog.
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Insults, such as "Don't be an idiot.. rtfa" or "Could you possibly sound any more stupid with this comment?" were more common for some blogs than the others. Thus, Wired Science and Panda's Thumb were filled with insulting commentary. Offensive remarks regarding somebody's personality or intellectual abilities most often targeted other commenters and the characters of posts, but sometimes they were directed at blog authors as well, such as the following comment in DrugMonkey blog: "You are correct, I never read a post in which you claim not to be pompous and arrogant".
See my commentary above about the importance of the history of individual blogs and the importance of moderation policies. Also worth noting in this example is that DrugMonkey blog is written by two authors, one of which (the one I presume was addressed in the comment you quote) is PhysioProf who very effectively uses profanity to get readers out of their comfort zones, with predictable responses.
In addition to personal attitudes and obvious digressions, where commenters would take an element from a blog post and develop it into an independent topic of conversation, a large portion of comments offered humorous and sarcastic remarks. Thus, the Wired Science post about nuclear weapons as a way to destroy asteroids got the following comments among others: "Got Bruce Willis?", "You don't want to destroy or deflect comets or asteroids, you want to capture and harvest them...", and "Like the SF writers of yore knew: Resistance is Futile".
Again, keep in mind that Wired Science is a corporate/media blog, written by journalists, with almost no comment moderation. Thus the Wild West feel of their comment threads is to be expected - it is more like YouTube than a blog in regard to expected commenting behavior. This usually does not happen on personal blogs.
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Science blogs examined in this study are very heterogeneous. They provide information and explain complicated matters, but their evaluations are often trivial and they rarely provide extensive critique or articulate positions on controversial issues. Kenix (2009) analyzed political news blogs as alternative news sources and found that the blogs offered binary, reductive analysis and dependent reporting. She also found that readers often provided caustic commentary and argued that comments can be considered a separate communicative sphere more akin to a neighborhood bar than to the Habermasian public sphere. It appears that science blogging can also be characterized as relying on reductive analysis and dependent reporting and drawing caustic and petty commentary.
Small sample, omission of blogs that almost entirely write posts for ResearchBlogging.org aggregation (eg, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Tetrapod Zoology, Neurotopia, Neurophilosophy), omission of highly technical blogs which are a center of that discipline's online community (e.g., Sauropod Vertebra Picture Of The Week, or Deep Sea News) and omission of some of the blogs with the most developed feelings of community - the female scientist blogs and Nature Network blogs, makes these points moot. This is akin to analysis of political blogs and omitting Firedoglake, Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post and Hullabaloo - the blogs that do heavy lifting, independent reporting, expert analysis, etc. Many such blogs exist in the science blogosphere but they were not included in this paper.
In their current multiplicity of forms and contents science blogs present a challenge rather than an opportunity for public engagement with science. Lack of genre conventions, which for the audience translates into broken expectations and uncertainty, impedes the development of stable readership and participation from the larger public. The "neighborhood bar" or "water cooler" commentary creates a sense of community with shared context and culture, but at the same time it creates a barrier that prevents strangers and outsiders from joining the conversation. As a community of scientists or individuals close to science, the existing readers may enjoy the entertaining nature of science blogs and not need science blogs to serve as a place for discussion and rational debate. Relying on such community of readers, bloggers may reduce their interpretive activities and resort to copying, re-distributing, and re-packaging of the existing information, which is still quite rewarding given the background of the majority of current readers and yet requires much less time and effort.
Blogs are technological tools, platforms. They can be used by corporations and organization for PR and news delivery, but that kind of blog does not attract much audience. Most blogs are personal blogs. It is the personality of the owner, combined with her/his expertise, that draws in the audience. A personal blog is a personal space for personal expression. Bloggers are likely to strongly resist any attempts by any group to influence the way they spend their free time conversing with friends online. In other words, they are not meant to be vehicles for science engagement with the public by design, but they serve that function very well precisely because of the personality of the blogger, (often self-deprecating) humor, often juicy language, and strong opinions. Scientists are supposed to be cool-headed, anti-social recluses - blogs show they are anything but, break the stereotypes and show the humanity of scientists. With this, comes the trust. And science engagement is all about trust - not the memorization of knowledge of scientific trivia.
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This study has a number of limitations. The study is based on a limited sample, and the applicability of its findings and conclusions needs to be tested further. The findings can serve as an initial step in the investigations of the relationship between science blogging and public engagement with science and in the development of the taxonomy of modes of participation. Due to the small number posts and comments, certain important modes of participation could have been overlooked. A more elaborate taxonomy of participation modes could serve as a basis for further genre analysis of science blogging. The role of humor in science communication and collective interpretation of knowledge also needs to be examined. Finally, the study would benefit from extending the analysis to lurkers, i.e., those readers who follow the content but do not post comments.
These limitations should be stated at the beginning of the article as well as here.
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So, this article was supposed to be the analysis of comments on science blogs, but did not actually study comments - it studied a tiny and unrepresentative sample of blogs, one of which is dead (Pure Pedantry) and thus slowly accuulating unmoderated spam comments.
I think it is important to read this article, as well as my commentary, in the light of recent discussions on The Intersection and Bioephemera.
Five years ago, I read every science blog in English language. I could, as there were only dozens of us. The science blogosphere was small and tight at the time. But remember where these blogs came from - they evolved out of political, atheist and skeptical blogs. There was 'Intersection' where Chris Mooney was collecting material for "Republican War on Science", there was 'Deltoid' fiercely fighting against Global Warning denialism, there was 'Pharyngula' providing a voice for atheists who until then thought they were alone (and who were then, after a series of anti-religious rants, delivered to some of the best written science posts ever, over and over again), there was my blog 'Science and Politics' where politics posts outnumbered the science posts at least 9:1. Not much more. Most science blogs were primarily focused on something else - politics, religion, skepticism, etc. - than on science. In many ways, early science blogs were really political blogs with a scientific twist.
Today, there are thousands of science blogs. Most of them are really science blogs - covering science in every, or almost every post. The ratio of science:other topics is much, much higher today than it was then.
I think everyone who focuses primarily on the old blogs, the same Google Reader list one had in 2005 without having it revised in the intervening five years, has no grasp of the current science blogosphere. Check out all the blogs registered at ResearchBlogging.org for starters. See the blogs on German, French Canadian, Brazilian and New Zealand science blogging networks, on Nature Network blogs, Nature Blog Network and Scientificblogging.com. Heck, if you ignore five or six blogs here on scienceblogs.com that are mainly focused on non-scientific topics and look at the remaining 70+ blogs - that's ScienceTM! Five years is eons on the Web. Any analysis of blogs and/or comments that is still in the 2005 mindset is missing everything.
Also remember that what was once a homogenuous, tightly knit group has split. There are now separate medical blogosphere, atheist blogopshere, skeptical blogosphere, birding blogosphere, green blogosphere, nature blogopshere, etc. All of those were once part of a single group. Each now has its own group, its carnivals, its unofficial leaders, its histories and customs and tone. Judging the science blogosphere by a few examples of ancient blogs that have changed a lot over the years, using old personal impressions about them to state what they are now, is misguided. There is plenty of blogs now for everyone's taste. Nobody is forcing you to read a blog that offends you. Move on, find blogs you like - there are so many good science blogs around today, there is not enough hours in a day to read them all even if you limit yourself only to those that do not blemish your thin skin.
Inna Kouper (2010). Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities Journal of Science Communication, 9 (1)Link
Update: Of course, this discussion is nothing new, either in science blogosphere, or in blogosphere as a whole. We have had, over the years, many (some heated) discussions on related topics: what makes a blog a 'science blog', what good it is, what is a purpose or goal of a science blog, why should one blog, is it good or bad for one's career, as well as topics that in some ways touch on this, e.g., framing science (which we do on blogs and as it relates to science outreach), pseudonymity vs. anonymity, the whole quesiton of 'tone' on blogs, not to forget the most recent "carpet" discussion about comment moderation. So this is nothing new to science blogs and much of what some bloggers said over the years is much more detailed, thoughtful and even scholarly than what is in this paper. Not to mention that some very similar discussions also occured in other blogospheres: academic, techie, political, feminist, etc. Here, I just want to give you a sampling of some ancient posts that most directly address the questions of this paper, all posts being between two and four years old:
Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?
There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Testes size is used as a proxy of male intrasexual competition, with larger testes indicative of greater competition. It has been shown that in some taxa, social mating systems reflect variance in testes size, but results are not consistent, and instead it has been suggested that genetic patterns of mating may reflect testes size. However, there are different measures of genetic patterns of mating. Multiple paternity rates are the most widely used measure but are limited to species that produce multi-offspring litters, so, at least for group living species, other measures such as loss of paternity to males outside the social group (extra group paternity) or the proportion of offspring sired by the dominant male (alpha paternity) might be appropriate. This study examines the relationship between testes size and three genetic patterns of mating: multiple paternity, extragroup paternity and alpha paternity. Using data from mammals, phylogenetically corrected general linear models demonstrate that both multiple paternity and alpha paternity, but not extra group paternity, relate to testes size. Testes size is greater in species with high multiple paternity rates, whereas the converse is found for alpha paternity. Additionally, length of mating season, ovulation mode and litter size significantly influenced testes size in one model. These results demonstrate that patterns of mating (multiple paternity and alpha paternity rates) determined by genetic analysis can provide reliable indicators of male postcopulatory intrasexual competition (testes size), and that other variables (length of mating season, ovulation mode, litter size) may also be important.
Molecular and morphological evidence unite the hemichordates and echinoderms as the Ambulacraria, but their earliest history remains almost entirely conjectural. This is on account of the morphological disparity of the ambulacrarians and a paucity of obvious stem-groups. We describe here a new taxon Herpetogaster collinsi gen. et sp. nov. from the Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian) Lagerstätte. This soft-bodied vermiform animal has a pair of elongate dendritic oral tentacles, a flexible stolon with an attachment disc, and a re-curved trunk with at least 13 segments that is directed dextrally. A differentiated but un-looped gut is enclosed in a sac suspended by mesenteries. It consists of a short pharynx, a conspicuous lenticular stomach, followed by a narrow intestine sub-equal in length. This new taxon, together with the Lower Cambrian Phlogites and more intriguingly the hitherto enigmatic discoidal eldoniids (Cambrian-Devonian), form a distinctive clade (herein the cambroernids). Although one hypothesis of their relationships would look to the lophotrochozoans (specifically the entoprocts), we suggest that the evidence is more consistent with their being primitive deuterostomes, with specific comparisons being made to the pterobranch hemichordates and pre-radial echinoderms. On this basis some of the earliest ambulacrarians are interpreted as soft-bodied animals with a muscular stalk, and possessing prominent tentacles.
How particular changes in functional morphology can repeatedly promote ecological diversification is an active area of evolutionary investigation. The African rift-lake cichlids offer a calibrated time series of the most dramatic adaptive radiations of vertebrate trophic morphology yet described, and the replicate nature of these events provides a unique opportunity to test whether common changes in functional morphology have repeatedly facilitated their ecological success. Specimens from 87 genera of cichlid fishes endemic to Lakes Tanganyka, Malawi and Victoria were dissected in order to examine the functional morphology of cichlid feeding. We quantified shape using geometric morphometrics and compared patterns of morphological diversity using a series of analytical tests. The primary axes of divergence were conserved among all three radiations, and the most prevalent changes involved the size of the preorbital region of the skull. Even the fishes from the youngest of these lakes (Victoria), which exhibit the lowest amount of skull shape disparity, have undergone extensive preorbital evolution relative to other craniofacial traits. Such changes have large effects on feeding biomechanics, and can promote expansion into a wide array of niches along a bentho-pelagic ecomorphological axis. Here we show that specific changes in trophic anatomy have evolved repeatedly in the African rift lakes, and our results suggest that simple morphological alterations that have large ecological consequences are likely to constitute critical components of adaptive radiations in functional morphology. Such shifts may precede more complex shape changes as lineages diversify into unoccupied niches. The data presented here, combined with observations of other fish lineages, suggest that the preorbital region represents an evolutionary module that can respond quickly to natural selection when fishes colonize new lakes. Characterizing the changes in cichlid trophic morphology that have contributed to their extraordinary adaptive radiations has broad evolutionary implications, and such studies are necessary for directing future investigations into the proximate mechanisms that have shaped these spectacular phenomena.
Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?
This was the first TEDx in the Triangle region (though Asheville beat us as being the first in the state) and, judging from the response of the audience, it seems everyone expects this will become a regular annual event. You can check out the Twitter account as well as the Twitter chatter if you search the #TEDxRTP hashtag.
The event was livestreamed and the rough videos are already up on the Ustream channel. Better quality videos will be posted soon (Ustream and/or YouTube, just check out the TEDxRTP webpage or Twitter account for updates when this happens).
TEDxNYED (on Twitter) was happening in NYC at the same time, focusing on "the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education" and a stellar line-up of speakers. The idea to organize TED events specifically for young people (both as presenters and key audience) sprung up spontaneously at both the RTP and NYC events - follow the #SpreadTED hashtag for more - though it has been done before at a local scale: see TEDxTerry (see this video for one example of their talks - I met Jennifer Kaban subsequently at AAAS).
As you may know, I was involved in the organization of the event to some extent, mostly early on. I do not remember now how I got a wiff that a group of locals was trying to organize this (Twitter, Facebook?), but I joined the group early on and we met several times for monthly organizational meetings. Realizing that location dictates everything else (number of participants, number of attendees, amount of food/coffee needed, sponsorship money needed to cover food/coffee, etc.) we set out to investigate location options in the Triangle and took a look at something like 40 potential locations. Some were too small, some too big, some too expensive, others fully booked for the year, and yet others just did not spatially fit for our event. We looked at theaters and movie theaters, hotels and convention centers, restaurants and cafes. In the end, I helped negotiate the perfect location - the RTP headquarters: perfect location smack in the center of the Triangle, easy drive from everywhere in the area, great LEED-silver building, and experienced staff that could help with myriads of aspects of organizing an event, from catering and parking to technical aspects (wifi, video recording etc.).
Later on, busy with ScienceOnline2010 and then trip to AAAS, I pulled out of the organization a little bit. I especially did not want to dictate the speakers, for two reasons: one generous, one selfish. First, I am already organizing the awesomest, most kick-ass, most well-known annual conference in the area where I have a big say as to who is speaking. Second, I wanted to see local speakers that I am not aware of, yet others think are worth listening to. Just like at Ignite Raleigh a few days earlier, all the speakers were new to me (at least in the sense that I have never seen them speak - I did know a few people from before, either from Real Life or from the online world). And I approached the TEDxRTP speaker line-up with a deliberate decision to be open and tolerant to everything, even if that is a little bit outside my own comfort zone.
And yes, several were outside of my comfort zone. As the theme of the event was "Living to Our Highest Potential", the talks were highly inspirational. Yes, several invoked spirituality, alternative medicine, uncritical infatuation with the "wisdom" of Ancient India, and even, gasp, religion, but none of them crossed the line for me, the rational, reality-based robot. The only talk that made me really uneasy is one that invoked a far too traditional and conservative vision of what a family looks like (and judging from the Twitter chatter, I was far from alone in being uneasy with it. Update: Carlee Mallard also agrees with me on this in her blog post).
I am an analytical kind of guy, so I analyzed the talks a lot! There was a lot of stuff there that I learned from the first time, from design of serious games, through the ways private companies are planning on going into outer space, to how to teach swimming, to business practices of trapist monks. Then there were talks which covered well-trodden ground but framed it differently, in a new and potentially useful way. And CatherineCaddenbroke my analytical shields and moved me emotionally.
What I was initially worried about turned out to be actually a good thing about TEDxRTP - the layering and mixing up of some very different presentations. It was not just talk after talk after talk. We showed four original TED videos (this is one of the rules of TEDx). We had one speaker read a poem. A trio playing serious music. And two (one planned one unplanned) skits of improvisation theater. The whole thing was connected together masterfully by MC for the day Zach Ward whose dry humor made the event even more fun. I hope he comes back to do it again next year.
This is a time of heavy concentration of similar events in the area. There was an Ignite Raleigh 2 on March 3rd (I already blogged about it), and upcoming are FizzledDurham on March 8th (that's tomorrow), Pecha Kucha Raleigh on March 23rd, and the March edition of The Monti also on March 23rd.
You can find these and other events on the Social Carolina calendar and plan accordingly - and hope you can get tickets, as most of these events sell out within minutes! Now that all these small independent groups are finding each other, we can probably be able to coordinate the dates and times better for the next year's events, including TEDxRTP2011.
On Friday, the Bride of Coturnix, Coturnietta, a friend of hers and I went to DPAC to see 'Spring Awakening'. As you may already know, this is a rock adaptation of an old play located in late-19th century Germany, following the growth and maturation of a group of high school students surrounded by a disciplinarian and authoritarian adult world, in which sex is taboo (so they have to learn on their own, feel guilt about it, and suffer consequences) and strict, dogmatic religion trumps every attempt at independent thought or questioning.
I have not seen the play before, though I have heard the soundtrack a million times, but the Bride of Coturnix has seen the original cast on Broadway and says that this rendering was excellent. I agree.
Yes, there is a moment of partial nudity on stage at one point. And a stylized masturbation. And a stylized sexual intercourse. And a kiss between two gay men. And a botched back-alley abortion that kills a girl. And an accurate portrayal of cowardly, insecure adults making up for their own shortcomings by preventing and punishing every youthful act that challenges their power, their standing on the top of the hierarchy, their mad use of religion to enforce that hierarchy, and their own unease with sexuality.
Which is the point of the play.
Which is why it is exactly the young people who are the target audience of the play. The warning on the DPAC website - "Parental Discretion is advised. Mature content, including brief partial nudity, sexual situations, and strong language." - is there more to satisfy the conservative, authoritarian, cowardly, sexually insecure, adult curmudgeons in our own current society than a statement of fact. Or a real warning to young people to stay away.
The funniest moment for me was when, at the end of Act I, the old man in front of me got up and said how scandalized he was, asking why there was no warning that this was R-rated! Hmmm, I guess a curmudgeon like that does not go online to see the warning either. And he missed the point of the show - that his style of curmudgeonness is exactly what the play is exposing for what it is: hypocritical and dangerous. It is people like him who are NOT the target audience of the play - it is the young people, being warned about folks like him.
On the other hand, do not trust Byron Woods of Independent Weekly for your theatrical reviews. It appears he is incapable of arriving on time (compare this to this - half the reviews are about how he was late, and complaining about it as if it's not his fault), and is more intent on appearing savvy (remember the 'Church of the Savvy' inflicting the media in general?) and slamming a play than telling something informative to the readers - compare his reviews to everyone else's review of the same play (another example, other than Spring Awakening, is last year's Fiddler on the roof, compare this to this).
DPAC had some variation in quality of shows this year (expected for such a new place), but 'Spring Awakening' was right at the top. If it comes to a theater near you, go and see it.
On Wednesday, Bride Of Coturnix and I went to Ignite Raleigh. There was an Ignite show in many cities around the world that night, and the one in Raleigh was one of the biggest, with 702 people in attendance, in Lincoln theater (which is far too small for such a crowd - but crowdiness made it more intimate). It was a blast. I saw a lot of old friends, met some of the people I only know from Twitter or blogs, and met some new ones. All 19 talks were excellent, thought-provoking and, what is important at Ignite, they were all full of energy and fun (and funny!). It is hard to pick favourites, as each speaker was very different, from local techies (including Henry Copeland of Blogads.com) to the local TV meterologist (she went to shool with Bride Of Coturnix) to the current Miss NC.
All of the speakers are on Twitter and it was fun to be able to tell them how much we appreciated their talks afterwards, ask additional questions about something they said, check out their blogs (and slideshows) and thus build a whole new local sub-community around this one event.
At the bottom of this post are links to some of the blog posts describing the event, both by participants and the audience. You can also check out the hashtag #igniteraleigh for more. The event was livestreamed on Ustream - you should be able to see the videos there soon (or on the Ignite Raleigh homepage).
Tomorrow is something similar yet different: TEDxRTP. TEDx conferences are local franchises of the TED conference. As someone said (I forgot where I read it), If Ignite is a poetry slam, TEDx is a poetry reading. More detailed explanation of differences between these similar-yet-different kinds of events can be found here.
I had a small involvement in the organization of TEDxRTP early on (and then kinda disappeared as ScienceOnline2010 and trip to AAAS10 took a lot of my time and energy away), but I negotiated that the location of the event would be at the RTP headquarters (those of you who attended #scio10 - that is where we all first got together and heard Michael Specter deliver Keynote Address) which is a perfect venue for this.
Tickets for TEDxRTP have sold out within hours two weeks ago (I was in the air during that entire period of opening and closing the registration period - it is just as being one of the organizers that I had my ticket reserved in advance), but we are aggressive at asking people who cannot make it to release the tickets to the waitlisters, so if you are on the waitlist, and check your e-mail early in the morning, perhaps you'll be lucky.... if not, watch all the videos!
Here are some of the blog posts about Ignite Raleigh #2:
Our American Scientist pizza lunch talk falls later than usual this month to accommodate our magazine's May-June issue deadline. Keep open the noon hour on March 30 and come hear Geoff Ginsburg, director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Duke University, discuss genomic and personalized medicine.
To keep you on your toes, we'll convene at a different spot: the easy-to-get-to headquarters of the NC Biotechnology Center here in RTP. Actually, as many of you know, there would be no pizza lunch this year without the support of the Biotech Center. In addition to their financial help, center staff kindly offered to host one of our gatherings this year.
American Scientist Pizza Lunch is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of all stripes. Feel free to forward this message to anyone who might want to attend. RSVPs are required (for the slice count) to [email protected]
Directions to the NC Biotechnology Center are here:
http://www.ncbiotech.org/about_us/regional_offices_and_directions/directions/index.html
Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we'll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.
There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Foraging bumblebees are normally associated with spring and summer in northern Europe. However, there have been sightings of the bumblebee Bombus terrestris during the warmer winters in recent years in southern England. But what floral resources are they relying upon during winter and how much winter forage can they collect? To test if urban areas in the UK provide a rich foraging niche for bees we set up colonies of B. terrestris in the field during two late winter periods (2005/6 & 2006/7) in London, UK, and measured their foraging performance. Fully automatic radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology was used in 2006/7 to enable us to record the complete foraging activity of individually tagged bees. The number of bumblebees present during winter (October 2007 to March 2008) and the main plants they visited were also recorded during transect walks. Queens and workers were observed throughout the winter, suggesting a second generation of bee colonies active during the winter months. Mass flowering shrubs such as Mahonia spp. were identified as important food resources. The foraging experiments showed that bees active during the winter can attain nectar and pollen foraging rates that match, and even surpass, those recorded during summer. B. terrestris in the UK are now able to utilise a rich winter foraging resource in urban parks and gardens that might at present still be under-exploited, opening up the possibility of further changes in pollinator phenology.
The mosquito Wyeomyia smithii overwinters in a larval diapause that is initiated, maintained and terminated by day length (photoperiod). We use a forward genetic approach to investigate transcriptional events involved in the termination of diapause following exposure to long-days. We incorporate a novel approach that compares two populations that differentially respond to a single day length. We identify 30 transcripts associated with differential response to day length. Most genes with a previously annotated function are consistent with their playing a role in the termination of diapause, in downstream developmental events, or in the transition from potentially oxygen-poor to oxygen-rich environments. One gene emerges from three separate forward genetic screens as a leading candidate for a gene contributing to the photoperiodic timing mechanism itself (photoperiodic switch). We name this gene photoperiodic response gene 1 (ppdrg1). WsPpdrg1 is up-regulated under long-day response conditions, is located under a QTL for critical photoperiod and is associated with critical photoperiod after 25 generations of recombination from a cross between extreme phenotypes. Three independent forward genetic approaches identify WsPpdrg1 as a gene either involved in the photoperiodic switch mechanism or very tightly linked to a gene that is. We conclude that continued forward genetic approaches will be central to understanding not only the molecular basis of photoperiodism and diapause, but also the evolutionary potential of temperate and polar animal populations when confronted with rapid climate change.
Since 1899 ringing (or banding) remained the most important source of information about migration routes, stopover sites and wintering grounds for birds that are too small to carry satellite-based tracking systems. Despite the large quantity of migrating birds ringed in their breeding areas in Europe, the number of ring recoveries from sub-Saharan Africa is very low and therefore the whereabouts of most small bird species outside the breeding season remain a mystery. With new miniaturized light-level geolocators it is now possible to look beyond the limits of ring recovery data. Here we show for the first time year round tracks of a near passerine trans-Saharan migrant, the European Hoopoe (Upupa epops epops). Three birds wintered in the Sahel zone of Western Africa where they remained stationary for most of the time. One bird chose a south-easterly route following the Italian peninsula. Birds from the same breeding population used different migration routes and wintering sites, suggesting a low level of migratory connectivity between breeding and wintering areas. Our tracking of a near passerine bird, the European Hoopoe, with light-level geolocators opens a new chapter in the research of Palaearctic-African bird migration as this new tool revolutionizes our ability to discover migration routes, stopover sites and wintering grounds of small birds.
Contemporary in-depth sequencing of environmental samples has provided novel insights into microbial community structures, revealing that their diversity had been previously underestimated. Communities in marine environments are commonly composed of a few dominant taxa and a high number of taxonomically diverse, low-abundance organisms. However, studying the roles and genomic information of these "rare" organisms remains challenging, because little is known about their ecological niches and the environmental conditions to which they respond. Given the current threat to coral reef ecosystems, we investigated the potential of corals to provide highly specialized habitats for bacterial taxa including those that are rarely detected or absent in surrounding reef waters. The analysis of more than 350,000 small subunit ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) sequence tags and almost 2,000 nearly full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed that rare seawater biosphere members are highly abundant or even dominant in diverse Caribbean corals. Closely related corals (in the same genus/family) harbored similar bacterial communities. At higher taxonomic levels, however, the similarities of these communities did not correlate with the phylogenetic relationships among corals, opening novel questions about the evolutionary stability of coral-microbial associations. Large proportions of OTUs (28.7-49.1%) were unique to the coral species of origin. Analysis of the most dominant ribotypes suggests that many uncovered bacterial taxa exist in coral habitats and await future exploration. Our results indicate that coral species, and by extension other animal hosts, act as specialized habitats of otherwise rare microbes in marine ecosystems. Here, deep sequencing provided insights into coral microbiota at an unparalleled resolution and revealed that corals harbor many bacterial taxa previously not known. Given that two of the coral species investigated are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, our results add an important microbial diversity-based perspective to the significance of conserving coral reefs.
In the human visual system, different attributes of an object, such as shape, color, and motion, are processed separately in different areas of the brain. This raises a fundamental question of how are these attributes integrated to produce a unified perception and a specific response. This "binding problem" is computationally difficult because all attributes are assumed to be bound together to form a single object representation. However, there is no firm evidence to confirm that such representations exist for general objects. Here we propose a paired-attribute model in which cognitive processes are based on multiple representations of paired attributes. In line with the model's prediction, we found that multiattribute stimuli can produce an illusory perception of a multiattribute object arising from erroneous integration of attribute pairs, implying that object recognition is based on parallel perception of paired attributes. Moreover, in a change-detection task, a feature change in a single attribute frequently caused an illusory perception of change in another attribute, suggesting that multiple pairs of attributes are stored in memory. The paired-attribute model can account for some novel illusions and controversial findings on binocular rivalry and short-term memory. Our results suggest that many cognitive processes are performed at the level of paired attributes rather than integrated objects, which greatly facilitates the binding problem and provides simpler solutions for it.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I grew up in rural South Dakota, with a high school graduating class of only 16 students. From a very young age, I had always been fascinated by paleontology (the study of past life, including dinosaurs). Because I didn't know any better, I started writing to paleontologists whose names I found in some of my books, asking for assistance with little research projects that I had devised. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew I was competing (and placing) in the Intel Science and Engineering Fair. (I feel just a twinge of personal pride over this, because I did rather well despite lacking access to the large research university labs and formal school programs that so many of my competitors had!) One of these projects led directly to my Ph.D. work at Stony Brook University, which I finished in 2008. Today, I'm a curator at Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California. Not only do I work as a researcher, but I'm also fortunate in that our museum is partnered with a high school (The Webb Schools), and many of the students from there are quite active in our museum's research, outreach, and other activities. Because of my own experiences, I'm firmly convinced that science can be done by anyone, and that science should be accessible to everyone.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
A good portion of my career (indeed, beginning in high school) has been devoted to understanding the horned dinosaurs (Triceratops and their relatives). I'm particularly interested in how their massive skulls, measuring up to 3 meters in total length, functioned. Horned dinosaurs are odd, in that they have giant sinuses beneath the horns. Some researchers had speculated these sinuses functioned as shock absorbers during horn-to-horn combat, based on the observation that bighorn sheep and other modern horned animals also have big sinuses in their skulls. It turns out that we really don't understand the sinuses even in modern animals - so many of my research efforts have focused on unraveling this problem. Other research projects have included describing and interpreting the evolutionary relationships of some new species of horned dinosaurs, paleopathology (the study of injury and disease in the fossil record), and the paleontology of Madagascar.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now, I'm working on advancing open science in my own field of paleontology. Open access publishing is certainly a part of this - I'm a volunteer section editor for paleontology at PLoS ONE. Paleontology is a science that relies heavily on lengthy descriptions and quality illustrations - but recent trends in science publishing mean that more and more of the "good stuff" is either consigned to effectively invisible supplemental information or just not published at all. It's my hope that not only will electronic publications like PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica increase the exposure of our research, but that they will improve the quality of our research by allowing paleontologists to publish complete, well-illustrated descriptions of specimens from the start. Second, I'm a firm proponent of increasing data sharing and transparency. The vast majority of quantitative studies in paleontology quite frankly aren't reproducible - the numbers behind the statistics are locked up on someone's hard drive. With the ease of including supplemental information or depositing data in online archives, there is simply no excuse for this situation. So, I (along with several colleagues) am working on changing this attitude in our field.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think it's really cool that it's so easy to connect scientists with other scientists, and scientists with interested members of the general public. That's part of the reason why Matt Wedel, Mike Taylor, and I founded the Open Dinosaur Project. In short, this project allows anyone with an internet connection (regardless of education, profession, or geographic location) to participate in dinosaur science. Our volunteers are helping us to amass a giant database of dinosaur limb bone measurements from the literature and museum specimens, which we're analyzing to understand the evolution of dinosaur locomotion. Every aspect of the project is open - from data collection to publication. Our volunteers provide measurements, suggest analytical approaches, and much more. Most of the participants will be co-authors on the resulting paper!
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I blog at The Open Source Paleontologist as well as The Open Dinosaur Project. Through these blogs, I trade research techniques and philosophies with colleagues and try to advance the case for open science within our discipline. Blogging has been a great way to meet other researchers, developing friendships and collaborations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Facebook in particular is most widely used in paleo, and it's proven to be useful for keeping up with everyone else's research activities. There's no doubt that all of this online activity is a huge positive.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
My favorite part of ScienceOnline was getting to meet so many folks I had only heard of or communicated with through the Internet - people like Pete Binfield and Janet Stemwedel. Even better were those unexpected meetings with so many other open science advocates. I left the conference energized and excited about carrying on the push for open science!
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Program Type: Science Talk
Date: Mar. 9, 7 pm - Mar. 9, 8 pm
Location: Museum of Natural Sciences - Auditorium
Fee: $6 General Public, $4 Members, $3 Students
The Ecological and Economic Importance of Sharks, Threats They Face, and How You Can Help
Lecture, slide show & video presentation by marine biologist David Shiffman
David Shiffman and friendShiffman graduated with distinction in Biology from Duke and is now a Masters in Marine Biology candidate at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. His research focuses on the feeding behavior and conservation of sandbar sharks. Shiffman is also a prolific writer for Southern Fried Science, one of the most widely read marine biology blogs on the internet.
Seating is limited. Reserve your seat now for this multimedia presentation by visiting or calling the Museum Box Office at 919.733.7450 x212. Fee: $6 for general public (discounts for Museum Members and Students).
The Museum's current special exhibit, "Megalodon: Largest Shark that Ever Lived," will be open from 5 to 7pm prior to the presentation. At 60 feet long and weighing nearly 100 tons, Carcharodon megalodon was the most powerful fish that ever lived and a dominant marine predator. While the Megalodon vanished 2 million years ago, its fascinating story continues to inspire lessons for contemporary science and shark conservation. "Megalodon" runs through May 9, 2010. Fee: $7 Adults; $5 Seniors/Students; $4 Children (5-11); free to Members.
Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we'll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.
There are 27 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Speckled rattlesnakes (Crotalus mitchellii) inhabit multiple islands off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. Two of the 14 known insular populations have been recognized as subspecies based primarily on body size divergence from putative mainland ancestral populations; however, a survey of body size variation from other islands occupied by these snakes has not been previously reported. We examined body size variation between island and mainland speckled rattlesnakes, and the relationship between body size and various island physical variables among 12 island populations. We also examined relative head size among giant, dwarfed, and mainland speckled rattlesnakes to determine whether allometric differences conformed to predictions of gape size (and indirectly body size) evolving in response to shifts in prey size. Insular speckled rattlesnakes show considerable variation in body size when compared to mainland source subspecies. In addition to previously known instances of gigantism on Ángel de la Guarda and dwarfism on El Muerto, various degrees of body size decrease have occurred frequently in this taxon, with dwarfed rattlesnakes occurring mostly on small, recently isolated, land-bridge islands. Regression models using the Akaike information criterion (AIC) showed that mean SVL of insular populations was most strongly correlated with island area, suggesting the influence of selection for different body size optima for islands of different size. Allometric differences in head size of giant and dwarf rattlesnakes revealed patterns consistent with shifts to larger and smaller prey, respectively. Our data provide the first example of a clear relationship between body size and island area in a squamate reptile species; among vertebrates this pattern has been previously documented in few insular mammals. This finding suggests that selection for body size is influenced by changes in community dynamics that are related to graded differences in area over what are otherwise similar bioclimatic conditions. We hypothesize that in this system shifts to larger prey, episodic saturation and depression of primary prey density, and predator release may have led to insular gigantism, and that shifts to smaller prey and increased reproductive efficiency in the presence of intense intraspecific competition may have led to insular dwarfism.
Malaria and alcohol consumption both represent major public health problems. Alcohol consumption is rising in developing countries and, as efforts to manage malaria are expanded, understanding the links between malaria and alcohol consumption becomes crucial. Our aim was to ascertain the effect of beer consumption on human attractiveness to malaria mosquitoes in semi field conditions in Burkina Faso. We used a Y tube-olfactometer designed to take advantage of the whole body odour (breath and skin emanations) as a stimulus to gauge human attractiveness to Anopheles gambiae (the primary African malaria vector) before and after volunteers consumed either beer (n = 25 volunteers and a total of 2500 mosquitoes tested) or water (n = 18 volunteers and a total of 1800 mosquitoes). Water consumption had no effect on human attractiveness to An. gambiae mosquitoes, but beer consumption increased volunteer attractiveness. Body odours of volunteers who consumed beer increased mosquito activation (proportion of mosquitoes engaging in take-off and up-wind flight) and orientation (proportion of mosquitoes flying towards volunteers' odours). The level of exhaled carbon dioxide and body temperature had no effect on human attractiveness to mosquitoes. Despite individual volunteer variation, beer consumption consistently increased attractiveness to mosquitoes. These results suggest that beer consumption is a risk factor for malaria and needs to be integrated into public health policies for the design of control measures.
For survival, most natural viruses depend upon the existence of spherical capsids: protective shells of various sizes composed of protein subunits. So far, general evolutionary pressures shaping capsid design have remained elusive, even though an understanding of such properties may help in rationally impeding the virus life cycle and designing efficient nano-assemblies. This report uncovers an unprecedented and species-independent evolutionary pressure on virus capsids, based on the the notion that the simplest capsid designs (or those capsids with the lowest "hexamer complexity", ) are the fittest, which was shown to be true for all available virus capsids. The theories result in a physically meaningful periodic table of virus capsids that uncovers strong and overarching evolutionary pressures, while also offering geometric explanations to other capsid properties (rigidity, pleomorphy, auxiliary requirements, etc.) that were previously considered to be unrelatable properties of the individual virus. Apart from describing a universal rule for virus capsid evolution, our work (especially the periodic table) provides a language with which highly diverse virus capsids, unified only by geometry, may be described and related to each other. Finally, the available virus structure databases and other published data reiterate the predicted geometry-derived rules, reinforcing the role of geometry in the natural selection and design of virus capsids.
Visual scene interpretation depends on assumptions based on the statistical regularities of the world. People have some preference for seeing ambiguously oriented objects (Necker cubes) as if tilted down or viewed from above. This bias is a near certainty in the first instant (~1 s) of viewing and declines over the course of many seconds. In addition, we found that there is modulation of perceived orientation that varies with position--for example objects on the left are more likely to be interpreted as viewed from the right. Therefore there is both a viewed-from-above prior and a scene position-dependent modulation of perceived 3-D orientation. These results are consistent with the idea that ambiguously oriented objects are initially assigned an orientation consistent with our experience of an asymmetric world in which objects most probably sit on surfaces below eye level.
College and university students experience substantial morbidity from influenza and influenza-like illness, and they can benefit substantially from vaccination. Public health authorities encourage vaccination not only before the influenza season but also into and even throughout the influenza season. We conducted the present study to assess the impact of various vaccination strategies including delayed (i.e., in-season) vaccination on influenza outbreaks on a college campus. We used a Susceptible → Infected → Recovered (SIR) framework for our mathematical models to simulate influenza epidemics in a closed, college campus. We included both students and faculty/staff in the model and derived values for the model parameters from the published literature. The values for key model parameters were varied to assess the impact on the outbreak of various pre-season and delayed vaccination rates; one-way sensitivity analyses were conducted to test the sensitivity of the model outputs to changes in selected parameter values. In the base case, with a pre-season vaccination rate of 20%, no delayed vaccination, and 1 student index case, the total attack rate (total percent infected, TAR) was 45%. With higher pre-season vaccination rates TARs were lower. Even if vaccinations were given 30 days after outbreak onset, TARs were still lower than the TAR of 69% in the absence of vaccination. Varying the proportions of vaccinations given pre-season versus delayed until after the onset of the outbreak gave intermediate TAR values. Base case outputs were sensitive to changes in infectious contact rates and infectious periods and a holiday/break schedule. Delayed vaccination and holidays/breaks can be important adjunctive measures to complement traditional pre-season influenza vaccination for controlling and preventing influenza in a closed college campus.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Mark MacAllister, Coordinator of On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoological Society to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born and educated in the Midwest--grew up in northwest Illinois, spent a lot of time on my grandparents' dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin, and went to undergrad school at Oberlin College. I then came south for the first of three tours of duty in North Carolina, including grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Also mixed in there is time spent living and working in Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Buffalo, Toronto, London and Chicago. I'm still a Midwesterner at heart, and really miss long sightlines and cold winters. But I love North Carolina, especially my current and quirky hometown of Pittsboro--it's kind of like "The Andy Griffith Show" where every third person is a massage therapist. I work for the North Carolina Zoological Society, which is based in Asheboro, but telecommute from my shed-in-the-woods office in Pittsboro.
Philosophically, I tend to find myself most interested in the place where technology, education (especially K-12 but also for adults) and environmental advocacy come together. I feel that each one of those can be improved by the application of the other two--if that makes any sense. I'm an early adopter in all three, and have been lucky enough to be able to be involved in somewhat radically new things in each area. I've been self-teaching on computers since 1982, beginning with a Kaypro running CP/M. My Master's degree is in Environmental Policy and Law, meaning that I took half my coursework in UNC's Political Science department and the other half through the Law School. And, as far as teaching goes--one of the nicest compliments anyone ever paid me was to call me a "natural teacher," meaning that I don't have a teaching license but I somehow manage to pull it off.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
After grad school, my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City. I spent five years out there working on wilderness advocacy. I did a lot of research in the field--getting paid to hike and camp in the deserts of southern Utah was a great gig--and also in the public document rooms of various state and federal agencies. The advocacy groups I worked with were involved in mining, grazing, water rights, logging and other threats to wilderness preservation. What I began to notice toward the end of my tenure there was that many issues that appeared to be landscape-related were actually endangered species-related, and as a result I began to become more interested in species preservation.
We came back to North Carolina and in 1996 I went to work for the Chatham County Schools administrative office. The state was just beginning to wire classrooms, the Internet was just beginning to find its footing in terms of K-12 education, and Chatham understood early on that a significant teacher training effort would need to follow close on the heels of the effort to get everything wired. My job was in many ways focused on creating an atmosphere of support for integrating the Internet into classrooms; in other words, I was asked to help teachers understand why adopting technology was in everyone's best interest, and then to work with them to actually help them gain those skills. Not long after we got started, Chatham was recognized as one of the ten top technology school districts in the country.
While this was all going on, I found myself thinking more and more about the content of the K-12 curriculum. It seemed obvious that a wonderful way to interest kids and meet curriculum goals was to focus the whole deal on the study of animals and wildlife, and to do so with technology-rich methods. I approached the Education Curator at the North Carolina Zoo, and not long after that we were partnering to build two websites focused on field-based wildlife research. These sites eventually evolved into FieldTripEarth, which is one of the many things I'm working on these days. I've been at the Zoo for ten years now, and have seen through a variety of other projects, ranging from teacher education (in both the US and Africa) to social media planning to field-based informal education.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I'm often thinking about "raw learning materials" (this is David Warlick's term, see Landmark Project) and how to best put them into the hands of students and teachers. I'm not particularly interested in curriculum--that is, in designing and assembling big packages of resources that teachers can then plug into their classrooms. Rather, I'm curious about how best to make original source material available to classrooms and, better yet, how to put those classrooms in contact with the people that actually generate those source materials (By source materials, I mean first-person narratives, photos, video, datasets, maps and so on that, taken together, tell a story about what a scientist or other field researcher is working on). FieldTripEarth wheels and deals in exactly this currency, and we've been successful in providing classrooms a way to access these materials from researchers working all over the world. What they do with them is, for the most part, up to the students and teachers--we do offer some generalized strategies for using the materials found on the website, but for the most part we urge everyone to apply them to meet their specific needs.
What I wish I could spend more time on--or at least be more successful at doing--is bringing various classrooms into substantive contact with each other. I don't mean waving at each other through Skype...rather, what I'm on the lookout for are ways to help students in various locations work together to solve learning problems, to interview field scientists, to author a video about a particular topic, and so on. I think there's a lot of potential in this, but I'm not convinced that teachers and administrators will buy into it.
More generally, I'm interested in teaching process and thinking skills to whoever will sit still long enough to learn them. What we commonly call the scientific method can of course be used to learn in any academic or technical area. Unfortunately, most schools aren't teaching thinking as an organized process; that's why I try to focus on the work being done by field researchers, because I consider them role models of sorts when it comes thinking that is both multi-disciplinary and systematic.
I have some other goals, of course. I'd like to figure out a way to make hiking and biking more a part of the K-12 classroom. I'd like to read and write more, and to think out loud with colleagues more frequently.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I've never really taken to blogging as part of my work, though I do read several blogs focused on politics and policy, both of which are hobby horses of mine. Twitter and Facebook are a relatively small part of my professional life, mostly because right now my employer focuses more on their utility in serving members than in educating them. I think these tools form a net positive, but will be much more relevant once we figure out how to use them as educational, rather than informational, resources.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best thing about the conference was witnessing the various interests people brought with them--as well as the varying levels of expertise. It helped me remember that this is still such an evolving area. The sessions were all strong, but for the most part my strongest impressions were formed outside of the meeting rooms.
As far as suggestions for next year--it would be cool to invite some consumers of science communication and let us see how they put it to work in their lives. There was a bit of that at 2010, but there's a lot of untapped experience out there.
And while we're at it, I'd love to have a session focused on the question "How do we make our students' experiences with technology at school at least as rich and relevant as the experiences they are having outside of school?"
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - 6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning
at 7:00 followed by Q&A;
Location: Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
We have come to think of the world as known. It isn't. Even basic parts of our own bodies remain totally unexplored. For example, have you ever stopped to wonder why you are naked? Aside from naked mole rats, we are among the only land mammals to be essentially devoid of hair. Why? Join us for a discussion about the human body and its adaptations to a world filled with predators, pathogens and parasites. Bring your appendix, if you still have one, and learn about its special purpose.
About the Speaker:
Rob Dunn is an ecologist in the Department of Biology at North Carolina State University where he studies the global distribution of life and how it is changing as we change the world. He also studies ants. Dunn's award-winning book "Every Living Thing" (Harper Collins, 2009) explores the strange limits of the living world and the stranger scientists that study them. His next book, "Clean Living is Bad for You ... and Other Modern Consequences of Having Evolved in the Wild," will be out in 2010. Dunn also writes articles for magazines including National Geographic, Natural History, Seed, Scientific American and National Wildlife. To read more of Rob's writing, sign up for his email list at:
Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we'll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.
There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
You may be aware that, as of recently, one of my tasks at work is to monitor media coverage of PLoS ONE articles. This is necessary for our own archives and monthly/annual reports, but also so I could highlight some of the best media coverage on the everyONE blog for everyone to see. As PLoS ONE publishes a large number of articles every week, we presume that many of you would appreciate getting your attention drawn to that subset of articles that the media found most interesting.
So, for example, as I missed last week due to my trip to AAAS, I posted a two-week summary of media coverage this Monday. And that took far more time and effort (and some silent cursing) than one would expect. Why?
I don't think I am a slouch at googling stuff. Some people joke that the entire Internet passes through my brain before it goes to the final audience. After all, I have been monitoring the Web for mentions of 'PLoS' and 'Public Library of Science' on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and elsewhere for a few years now. If I don't catch a mention within minutes of it being posted, you can bet one of my many online friends/followers/subscribers is bound to quickly let me know by e-mail or Direct Messaging somewhere. If someone says something nice about PLoS, I am quick to post a ThankYou note. If someone asks a question, I try to answer or to connect the person with the appropriate member of the PLoS staff. If someone is publicly musing about submitting a manuscript to one of our journals, I am right there to give encouragement. If someone makes a factual error, I gently correct it. It is very, very rare that I need to raise the Immense Online Armies because someone is wrong on the Internet ;-)
So, why is it difficult then to compile a collection of weekly media coverage? Let me walk you through the process....
First, as you probably already know, PLoS makes no distinction between Old and New media. We have bloggers on our press list who apply/sign-up in the same way and abide by the same rules as traditional journalists (and, unlike mainstream media, bloggers NEVER break embargos, not once in the past three years since we started adding bloggers to our press list). For the kind of coverage we prefer to see, we point bloggers to the ResearchBlogging.org criteria. In return, bloggers can send trackbacks to our articles, their work is showcased side-by-side with the traditional outlets in our weekly posts, they can be discovered via Google Blogsearch, Postgenomic and ResearchBlogging.org links directly from each article, and one blogger per month wins a t-shirt and special recognition.
So, I start with blog posts first. The first thing I do is take a look at ResearchBlogging.org. Those are the best of the best posts - not merely mentioning our articles, but adding analysis, commentary, critique, context and additional information. How do I find them? I just search the site for the phrase 'journal.pone'. That search brings up every single post that mentions a PLoS ONE article because that phrase is a part of every possible form of the URL of the article (including the shortest one, which includes just the DOI). If a post links to our article (and that is the only way to get aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org) I will find it this way. Needless to say, this process takes just a few minutes per week.
Knowing that there are some good blogs out there that are not registered at ResearchBlogging.org (which is strange and unfathomable why - RB.org is a 'stamp-of-approval' place for science blogs recognized by the outside world of journals and media, as well as a nice way to get extra recognition and traffic, and even awards), I then repeat the same search - for 'journal.pone' - on Google Blogsearch. This may bring up a few more posts that I did not catch yet. Occasionally, some of these are good. Another couple of minutes. Blogs are now done. Move on to traditional media....
And this is where the Hell starts. Try searching Google News for 'journal.pone'...?! All I get are a couple of prominent blogs that I have already counted, e.g., those blogs that are listed by Google News (scienceblogs.com blogs, Ars Technica, Wired blogs, etc.). Where are the others?
The problem is, nobody in the mainstream media links to papers.
So I have to search for PLoS and for Public Library Of Science and then figure out which ones are covering specifically PLoS ONE articles (sometimes they don't specify, sometimes they name the wrong journal - last week an article on PLoS Current-Influenza was reported to be in PLoS ONE by a number of outlets copying the error from each other). Then I have to search for keywords for individual articles I suspect may have received some coverage. Last week, for example, I searched for "swallows+antioxidants" and "St. Birgitta", among many others. This lasts for hours! And at the end I am still not 100% sure I caught everything. How frustrating!
Not just is there a big difference in time and effort spent between finding blog posts and finding media articles, but there is an even bigger disparity when one considers what results come out of these searches. I have been doing this for a month now. I expected that there would be poor blog posts and poor media articles, that there would be good blog posts and good media articles, and that there would occasionally be some excellent blog posts and excellent media articles. So far, that is true.... except I have yet to discover an excellent media article. As a rule, the very best coverage of every paper in the past month was done by a blogger or two or three. Then there are some other, good pieces of coverage in both the New and Old media, and then there are some really bad pieces in both realms as well (not all blog posts I count here are really bad - they may just be too detailed, technical and dry for lay audience because the blogger is intentionally targeting scientific peers as audience, which is fair thing to acknowledge).
So, every week, it takes me a few minutes to find the very best coverage (which is on blogs, usually those aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org). And then I spend hours looking for remnants, in the traditional media, which turn out to be so-so, some OK, some not so good, some horrible. If I wasn't paid to do this, I would not do it - it cannot be good for my long-term mental health.
The resistance to post links is an atavism, a remnant of an old age before the Web. I know (because I asked many times) many good science journalists keep trying to add links, but the editors say No. The traditional media has still not caught on to the Ethic of the Link, which is an essential aspect of ethics of online communication.
I can think, off the top of my head, of three good reasons why everyone who publishes online should include a link to the scientific paper described in the article (just post the DOI link that comes with the press release if you are on the press list - if it does not resolve immediately, it is not your fault, you can always blame the journals for being slow on it - though this should never happen with PLoS articles):
Reason One: I will not go crazy every week. I am assuming that every scientific publisher has people on the staff whose task is to monitor media coverage and each one of these people is cussing and cursing YOU, the Media, every day. Try to make friends with people who provide you with source material on a regular basis.
Reason Two: Media coverage is one of the many elements of article-level metrics. Furthermore, links from the media affect the number of views and downloads of the article, and those are also elements of article-level metrics. Number of views/downloads then, in the future, affects the number of citations the work gets which is also and element of article-level metrics. Thus omitting the link skewes the ability of readers and observers to evaluate the papers properly.
The current ecosystem of science communication has a scientific paper at its core, additions to the paper (e.g., notes, comments and ratings, as well as Supplemental materials, videos posted on Scivee.tv, etc) as a shell, and incoming and outgoing links - trackbacks, cited papers, citing papers, links to other papers in the same Collection, links to other papers with the same keywords, and yes, incoming links from the media - as connections building a network: the entire inter-connected ecosystem of scientific knowledge.
By not linking to scientific papers, traditional media is keeping itself outside of the entire ecosystem of empirical knowledge. By doing this, the traditional media is fast making itself irrelevant.
Reason Three: if an article in the media discusses a scientific study, that scientific paper is the source material for the article. If the link is missing, this is an automatic red flag for the readers. What is the journalist hiding? Why is the article making it difficult for readers to fact-check the journalist? Something does not smell good if the link is not provided (or worse, it is impossible to figure out even who are the authors and in which journal did they publish - yes, that is more common than you think).
The instant and automatic response of the readers is mistrust. Every time you fail to link to the paper, you further erode whatever trust and reputation you still may have with the audience. You soon cease to be a legitimate source of information. Sure, most readers will not go hunting for the paper to read it in order to fact-check you. But two or three will, and they will let everyone else know if your article is trustworthy or not, either in the comments under the article on your own site, or on their blogs which will be quickly picked up by Google (remember: Google loves blogs).
So please, media types, hurry up and catch up with the world. The 21st century is already a decade in - you really need to do some very fast learning. Right now. Or you'll go extinct in a nanosecond. And despite my reputation, I never said that I'd consider that result to be a Good Thing. We are in this together, you just need to do your part. To begin with, start linking.
Go to the Metrics tab of the article, scroll down until you see CrossRef citations, click to expand the list of papers that cite the paper you are on. You will see, next to some papers, a tiny PDF icon. Clicking on that icon will open the PDF of the paper you are looking for.
How is that possible? PLoS partnered with PubGet to make this work. Unfortunately, not every article has the PDF icon because not every paper is freely accessible. It works with Open Access articles, but if the paper is not, then it may still work if you are affiliated with one of the 170 institutions in the PubGet network. If your institution is not a part of their network, you should work on getting it included there: just tell your library - Pubget is free.
But it is hard to explain how cool and quick and easy this is in mere words. It is much better to use the magic of screencast video, so here is a brief tutorial:
James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University
Who Put the Monkey in the Driver's Seat?
Venue: Room 101 David Clark Laboratories
The NCSU, W. M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology is pleased to sponsor a seminar by a scholar in the field of Behavioral Economics who is also recognized for his ability to communicate the fascinating findings in this field to the public. When we make "decisions" we think that we are in control. Dan Ariely explains some of the hidden forces that actually control those decisions.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I'm originally from Baltimore, but moved to North Carolina 8 years ago for undergrad and never looked back. I currently live in Beaufort, NC. I'm working towards my Ph.D in Deep Sea Population Genetics at the Duke University Marine Lab. I was the kid who wanted to be a marine biologist since I was six.
Philosophically I guess you could call me a Happy Fatalist. We've profoundly changed the world and anthropogenic influences on the environment are going to be the driving force for almost all societal change in the foreseeable future, but I'm less panicked about the way things are changing and more excited to be part of the largest experiment in human history. Most of the changes we're going to see in the next few decades are unavoidable, we've passed the tipping point. People are often afraid to admit that, but eventually we need to not just reduce our impact on the environment, but also preparing for the major changes that are going to happen. We love to promote the myth of a balanced environment that's somehow being upset, but the environment is always changing. The sooner we accept that environmentalism is about human values and not so archetypal perfect environment, the better off we're going to be in the long run.
So I come from the position that we need to shift our focus from how to prevent changes to how we're going to deal with the inevitable.
My scientific background is largely in marine biology and population genetics, with a brief segue into mycology for a couple of years.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I started off working as an Aquarist Assistant at the National Aquarium in Baltimore rearing seahorses. That was my first real chance to design my own experiments. I was part of the Syngnathid Breeding Program, and some of my seahorses are still swimming around aquariums throughout the world. From there I upgraded to a lab tech in a Mycology lab before entering grad school. I started my grad career studying the biodiversity of deep sea fungi that occur at methane seeps. No one had ever really looked at deep sea fungi, so I thought I was all cool breaking new ground. As it turns out, there just isn't that much fungi down there, or if there is, it's very elusive. I'm currently putting together a crowdsourced guide to conservation genetics geared towards managers and the general public.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now I'm just trying to make it through my Preliminary exams intact. Blogging is acting as my stress relief outlet (which is why most of my posts recently have been jokes about Global Draining). Other than that, I'm brewing experimental beers. My last batch I replaced all of the grains with green tea leaves to create a sort of Green Tea Pale Ale. It should be ready in a couple weeks, so I'll let you know how it turns out.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I've been really excited about Twitter lately. Suddenly I have a huge collection of experts available whenever I need them. Just send out a quick question and I usually get 5 or 6 answers by the end of the day.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
My undergrad institution was one of the first to get Facebook, so I've been on it for pretty much my entire academic career, so I have no idea if it's been a net positive or negative. Twitter for sure is neutral, I get tons of help from my twitter network, but it can also be a huge time sink. All in all I feel like online activity follows the old (ways to be more efficient)/(ways to procrastinate) = no net change.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I got into science blogging through Kevin Zelnio, who I share an office with. My favorites are for sure the marine blogs - Deep Sea News, Oyster's Garter (which I guess is Deep Sea News now too), Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets, blogfish. I met nearly all the cool science blogs I follow from Science Online 09 and this years conference.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
This was the first time I went in with a smart phone, and the amount of content that was streaming out of the twitterverse was astounding. It was almost like I could listen in on four conferences at once. It might be nice to have a closing keynote to bring everyone back together at the end of the meeting as well as the beginning.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thank you and I can't wait for the next conference.
Nanotechnology has the enormous potential to change our society. New advances in medicine, energy production, environmental cleanup and better access to clean water are just a few of the many possibilities. According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, the number of products that use nanomaterials has increased almost 380% since 2006. But, is it the same special properties that make nanoscale materials so useful that also pose potential risks to humans and the environment? Join Dr. Emily Bernhardt from the Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology to discuss the fate of nanomaterials in our environment and why you should care.
Speaker: Dr. Emily Bernhardt, Assistant Professor of Biology at Duke University and Program Leader at the Center for Environmental Implication of NanoTechnology
Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we'll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.
Four of the seven PLoS journals post new articles on Monday nights - let's see what is exciting and bloggable today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Snakes first appear in the fossil record towards the end of the dinosaur era, approximately 98 million years ago. Snake fossils from that time are fragmentary, usually consisting of parts of the backbone. Relatively complete snake fossils preserving skulls and occasionally hindlimbs are quite rare and have only been found in marine sediments in Afro-Arabia and Europe or in terrestrial sediments in South America. Early snake phylogeny remains controversial, in part because of the paucity of early fossils. We describe a new 3.5-m-long snake from the Late Cretaceous of western India that is preserved in an extraordinary setting--within a sauropod dinosaur nest, coiled around an egg and adjacent the remains of a ca. 0.5-m-long hatchling. Other snake-egg associations at the same site suggest that the new snake frequented nesting grounds and preyed on hatchling sauropods. We named this new snake Sanajeh indicus because of its provenance and its somewhat limited oral gape. Sanajeh broadens the geographical distribution of early snakes and helps resolve their phylogenetic affinities. We conclude that large body size and jaw mobility afforded some early snakes a greater diversity of prey items than previously suspected.
Inferring the behavior and function of ancient organisms is hard. Some paleontologists would say that it cannot be done because such hypotheses can never be testable, whereas others would say that this is surely a prime task for paleontology--to seek to bring ancient organisms back to life.
These issues have long troubled paleontologists. The founder of comparative anatomy, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), insisted on the common pattern of the skeleton of living and fossil vertebrates and that anatomy could be reconstructed with confidence from incomplete fossil remains. Further, he argued that the skeleton of a living or extinct animal held unequivocal clues about function and behavior. Cuvier saw his mission to establish rules for comparative anatomy that would allow paleontologists to make certain statement with clarity and confidence [1], a key principle today, what one might call "evidence-based reconstruction" (for example, sharp teeth indicate a diet of meat rather than plants, or mammalian characters in the teeth indicate that the unknown animal was endothermic and nourished its young from mammary glands) as opposed to speculation ("this dinosaur was purple because I guess it was").
As a result of domestication, selection for desirable phenotypes, and breed propagation, the domestic dog is unmatched in its diversity as a land mammal. Exhibiting extraordinary levels of both interbreed heterogeneity and intrabreed homogeneity, evidenced in part by the extensive linkage disequilibrium observed in many breeds, the dog provides an as-yet unrealized opportunity to uncover the molecular mechanisms that govern natural variation across mammalian species. We herein discuss recent advances in canine genomics that have made exploration of genetic mechanisms controlling breed-specific differences possible. We consider some examples where molecular mechanisms controlling simple traits have been uncovered. Finally, we reveal how combinations of genes produce complex phenotypes that can be revealed through studies of dog breeds featuring specific traits.
Piscidins constitute a family of cationic antimicrobial peptides that are thought to play an important role in the innate immune response of teleosts. On the one hand they show a remarkable diversity, which indicates that they are shaped by positive selection, but on the other hand they are ancient and have specific targets, suggesting that they are constrained by purifying selection. Until now piscidins had only been found in fish species from the superorder Acanthopterygii but we have recently identified a piscidin gene in Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), thus showing that these antimicrobial peptides are not restricted to evolutionarily modern teleosts. Nucleotide diversity was much higher in the regions of the piscidin gene that code for the mature peptide and its pro domain than in the signal peptide. Maximum likelihood analyses with different evolution models revealed that the piscidin gene is under positive selection. Charge or hydrophobicity-changing amino acid substitutions observed in positively selected sites within the mature peptide influence its amphipathic structure and can have a marked effect on its function. This diversification might be associated with adaptation to new habitats or rapidly evolving pathogens.
Blood-sucking bugs of the genus Rhodnius are major vectors of Chagas disease. Control and surveillance of Chagas disease transmission critically depend on ascertaining whether households and nearby ecotopes (such as palm trees) are infested by these vectors. However, no bug detection technique works perfectly. Because more sensitive methods are more costly, vector searches face a trade-off between technical prowess and sample size. We compromise by using relatively inexpensive sampling techniques that can be applied multiple times to a large number of palms. With these replicated results, we estimate the probability of failing to detect bugs in a palm that is actually infested. We incorporate this information into our analyses to derive an unbiased estimate of palm infestation, and find it to be about 50% - twice the observed proportion of infested palms. We are then able to model the effects of regional, landscape, and local environmental variables on palm infestation. Individual palm attributes contribute overwhelmingly more than landscape or regional covariates to explaining infestation, suggesting that palm tree management can help mitigate risk locally. Our results illustrate how explicitly accounting for vector, pathogen, or host detection failures can substantially improve epidemiological parameter estimation when perfect detection techniques are unavailable.
The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that at time strangely wills and works for itself.
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Andrea Novicki from the Duke CIT blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hi, thank you so much for asking. I'm currently employed at Duke University in the Center for Instructional Technology as an academic technology consultant for the sciences - I work with faculty who teach science or math, to help them figure out how to effectively and efficiently help students learn, using technology. My work is a satisfying combination of science, education and technology. Scientifically, I began as a marine biologist as an undergraduate and in early grad school; still, marine biology feels like my natural home. I became inspired by a summer course to study neural systems and behavior, because investigating changes in behavior at the level of changes in molecules in single, identified neurons was both exciting and satisfying. After a couple of postdocs and a tenure track faculty position, I stepped away from research and teaching and I went sailing, driven by a restless sense of adventure. I'm now back in academia, working with smart, interesting people.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I have been involved with some great projects; if there is a theme, it is change, both in my research projects and in my career. I've investigated the neural pathways that mediate color change in squid and octopus and I participated in research cruises identifying midwater ocean animals. On land I worked with insects, monitoring and altering activity in single neurons that correlate with behavior change, and predicting and then, satisfyingly, finding a neuron with particular characteristics.
I (and many other people) began to question the traditional lecture way that science was taught and early on, I began using computers and technology to help students learn biology.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My goals? Do I have to be realistic? I'd like to contribute to making science accessible; I'd like for everyone to recognize the beautiful complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world at all scales, and find joy of figuring out for themselves how things work.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I'm excited about the increased openness and social nature of science. In my grad school days, the model was that successful scientists kept to themselves until they published, and then only in reputable, peer-reviewed journals; anything else was considered frivolous and distracting. Now, because of the web, science is now more public and more accessible (accessible both technologically and in presentation style). I'm a huge fan of Jean-Claude Bradley's open notebook science approach, ever since I heard him speak at the first science blogging conference. This project (and many others) make the process of science more open. Passionate blogs by students and post docs as well as people who run their own labs show what science is really like - it's done by caring people with feelings and emotions, not just some distant, always-right white-coated professor. This openness about the process, as well as the explanations of results made accessible (like at researchblogging.org) have the potential to illustrate the appeal of science to everyone.
I'd like to see people use some of the new visualization tools to explore publically available data sets to make new discoveries, just because they are curious, regardless of their final degrees or institutional affiliation.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I lurk on numerous blogs, and I love scienceblogs, it's a great way to keep up on how science is changing, and visit my favorite topics. I'm very fortunate, in that monitoring how people use technology to communicate science (for science education) is part of my job. I follow people on Twitter and find it a useful way to find new ideas and resources, and contribute occasionally. Although I do have an account on Facebook, I rarely look at it.
I do contribute to a blog, but it's more about technology in education than about science, and is part of my job. As a confirmed introvert, I find blogging difficult. I am, by nature, a lurker. I'm in awe of people who can toss off a post without thinking it over and over and over.
In other words, all of this online activity is necessary for my work; I do not contribute enough, but I benefit tremendously.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Every session I attended was thought-provoking! Stacy Baker's students stole the show again; my notes have many observations about their attitudes towards technology. I also welcomed the sessions by librarians - their ability to find information, and think about how it is organized will continue to be invaluable.
I observed that the conference had many people attending who were not exactly science bloggers (people like me, for example), which showed how many options there are for people to participate in science online in some way, even if they are not, strictly speaking, science bloggers.
There's still something wonderful about meeting someone for the first time after you've already read their writing - it's like you can peek into their brain. When you meet a blogger (or any writer), your first impression has already been formed and modified and added to, and their physical appearance is irrelevant. It's an almost utopian ideal - people are judged by the quality of their thoughts, not what they look like.
At one session, during a discussion of Google Earth and GIS, Cameron Neylon thought aloud about using visualizations as a way of distributing data, which is something I had been thinking about, as a way of making science, and raw data, more accessible. He, of course, said it more elegantly and I will be thinking about this for some time. How can good visualizations be used as a way of distributing data, in a way that does not immediately shape a conclusion but allows for exploration?
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I'm sure I'll see you before then, and I expect you'll join our event again next January.
I was born and educated in the Midwest--grew up in northwest Illinois, spent a lot of time on my grandparents' dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin, and went to undergrad school at Oberlin College. I then came south for the first of three tours of duty in North Carolina, including grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Also mixed in there is time spent living and working in Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Buffalo, Toronto, London and Chicago. I'm still a Midwesterner at heart, and really miss long sightlines and cold winters. But I love North Carolina, especially my current and quirky hometown of Pittsboro--it's kind of like "The Andy Griffith Show" where every third person is a massage therapist. I work for the 
