Blogs

A Blog Around the Clock

  • New URL for this blog
    2:15pm | Jul 5, 2011

    Earlier this morning, I have moved my blog over to the Scientific American site - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/. Follow me there (as well as the rest of the people on the new Scientific American blog network

  • New URL/feed for A Blog Around The Clock
    9:17pm | Jul 26, 2010

    This blog can now be found at http://blog.coturnix.org and the feed is http://blog.coturnix.org/feed/. Please adjust your bookmarks/subscriptions if you are interested in following me off-network.

  • A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Scienc...
    5:00pm | Jul 19, 2010

    It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.

    Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing - why I feel like I must leave now.

    Sb beginnings

    Scienceblogs.com started back in January 2006. On that day, several of my favourite science bloggers moved to this new site, posting the URL on their farewell posts on their old blogs. I took one look at the homepage - which at the time was a simple, black-on-white version of the current Last 24 Hours page - and said to myself: this is where I want to be. My instant feeling was that whoever does not get on this site will bite the dust - become invisible in the shadow of the network. I e-mailed several of the original 14 bloggers with a simple question: "How do I get on?" They all assured me that the site will add more bloggers and that my name is already 'in the hat'. In June of that year, I was one of the 20+ bloggers in the "second wave" of migrants to Scienceblogs.com.

    How the move to Sb changed my blogging

    You can hide on your own little Blogspot blog. You cannot hide on a network. My first instinctive and unconscious change, something I only became of aware later, was that I changed the way I made factual statements in my posts. What does that mean?

    I started thoroughly fact-checking the statements before posting instead of learning the hard way that readers will do it for you.

    Of course, I started (in 2003/4) in political blogging where much is a matter of opinion, stakes are high, tempers are short, speed of blogging is important, and stating things confidently and even ferociously is important as a persuasion method. If I have heard some useful factoid somewhere, I would often boldly claim it as true without checking first.

    But then I gradually switched to blogging about science. This is the domain of verifiable facts. The goal is education, not so much political action. I wrote about my area of expertise, and I wrote in a way that built on that expertise and made it accessible to the lay public. I wrote about things I knew a lot about and was very familiar with the literature. So I referenced, cited and linked to a lot of supporting documents - peer-reviewed scientific papers.

    When I moved to Scienceblogs, I doubled up on that effort, even when writing on other topics. Sometimes I wrote purposefully provocative posts, stating extreme positions and playing Devil's advocate. Such posts were written as mind experiments, or as "let's see how far the blind following of the logic can take us, even if it sounds crazy" and I hoped that nobody would mistake them for my real positions. But I tried not to make statements of fact if I was not sure they were actually facts. I became a better blogger. My place here requires I be trusted. For that, I needed to trust myself first.

    Getting invited to blog here is an honor, and the only correct response is to blog with maximal integrity, even during online fights and kerfuffles that alight in every corner of the blogosphere, including the science blogosphere, with predictable regularity. Every single blogger on scienceblogs.com, even those who I may disagree with 99% of the time, blogs here with strong personal integrity (yes, human beings sometimes make mistakes, but they correct them once the onslaught dies down and it is possible to do it without losing face). And that is one of the greatest strengths of this network - just wander around the Web randomly for a while and you'll see some interesting contrasts to this.

    How getting hired by PLoS changed my blogging

    Most of you probably know that I got the job with PLoS in the comments section of my blog. It is the support for my application for the role at PLoS voiced by my commenters that sealed the deal in the eyes of PLoS. Would I have that kind of support if I was not on Scienceblogs.com?

    As an Online Community Manager at PLoS, I try to model myself and learn from the experiences of people like Robert Scoble, one of the first "corporate bloggers" (and everyone who thinks there is anything new or wrong with being paid to blog, should read Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg, a definitive history of blogging which will open your eyes). I have been a supporter (and promoter) of Open Access model of scientific publishing well before I got this job and I often blogged about PLoS papers because I - and everyone esle - have access to them. PLoS is a fabulous organization to work for. Its goals match my own. And I love all the individual people working there. Working with them is a blast, and I am proud of it. It is unfortunate that, in this economic situation (and my own personal economic situation), I can only work there part-time.

    I assume that many of my readers are also interested in Open Access and may also be interested in what PLoS does. So, I blog (and tweet, etc,) about news from PLoS. As I see which new papers are coming out in PLoS ONE (and other PLoS journals) a couple of days in advance, I pick those that catch my attention, that I personally find interesting, and post links to them here once they are published. Nobody at PLoS has ever asked me to blog (or not blog) anything work-related on my own individual blog (that is what everyONE blog is for). I do it because I am genuinely excited about some of the papers, or am proud of what the PLoS team at the HQ has accomplished - new functionalities or benchmarks, etc. Like everyone else, I am promoting a cause I believe in, and I am blogging what I want and like.

    One of the things that changed in my blogging comes from self-awareness that I am an online public face of PLoS. I need to behave in ways that are appropriate for this role. Thus I try to avoid (as much as that is possible) getting into big online fights and I am more careful about my use of language, especially profanity. The fact that I am much less likely today to blog on very controversial topics reflects much more my own tiredness of such topics and the endless flame-wars and troll-hunting that always follow such posts. It gets really boring after a while. I just don't have much appetite and energy for that any more (if you think battling Creationists is nasty, try debating nationalists of various stripes from the Balkans on Usenet during the wars there - those people WOULD really kill you if they could physically get at you). I want my blog to be a positive force (while fully understanding that would be impossible if others were not doing the dirty trench warfare at the same time, providing the environment in which a positive blog can exist) and I want it to be a creative place, an informative place, and a peaceful and welcoming place for everyone interested in science and in science communication. And for my Mom. Hi, Mom!

    So, while this is supposed to be my individual blog, I think of it as such, and it is seen by others as such, it is impossible to completely separate the personal from the professional. I am one of the lucky few for whom life and work are perfectly integrated - I do what I love, with great support (emotional and financial) from my wife. One of the things I am is a promoter of Open Access and PLoS, so this part of my persona is bound to find its way onto my personal blog - it would be self-censorship NOT to allow that stuff onto my blog.

    Metcalf's Law, or why are we here at scienceblogs.com

    It appears that many commenters during the recent l'affair Pepsi did not understand the difference between blogging on Scienceblogs.com and blogging independently on Blogspot or Wordpress. It is not so much about the direct traffic. It is not so much about payment (I earned through Blogads, back on my old blog in 2006, the same amount as I am getting here today). It is the 'network effect'.

    Let's say I keep blogging my usual stuff day after day. I get some regular readers, some people coming from searches, some people coming from external links, etc. I also get a lot of traffic from other blogs here, from the homepage, Last24H page, from the various widgets (e.g., Reader's Choice, Editor's Choice, top page banner), multiple kinds of RSS feeds (e.g., Select Feed), etc. But if I have to say something really important, something that may require action, or something that many people need to know, or an important question that I may ask, there is a group of people that I can rely on much more than just my usual daily readership - the SciBlings (the name given to my fellow bloggers on Scienceblogs.com). I know they will pick up an item, link to it on their own blogs, and dramatically increase my reach for that one particular item. I don't need to beg, or e-mail anyone, this happens spontaneously by the virtue of me being piece. Remember that still very few people read blogs through RSS feeds - they come via searches and links. These days, some of those links are posted by my SciBlings also in other places like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Then others, outside the network, start linking to it and blogging/tweeting about it, spreading my message far and wide. This is something that would be much more difficult on an independent blog. This is what I call "indirect traffic" - a potential instant reach that I get just by virtue of being on this network.

    This kind of network effect resulted in an explosive rise in the online reputation and ranking of Scienceblogs.com. Technorati does not count Sb as a single entity (it used to), but ranks each blog independently. The most high-trafficked blog here, Pharyngula, is ranked at number 68 today. The 68th most influential blog in the world right now. Even if Pharyngula accounts for as much as half of the traffic here (I think it is at around 40%...OK, just checked, it is 42.15%) and half of the number of incoming links to the site, the site as a whole is probably up around top 30th of all the blogs in the world. That is serious visibility and influence for all of us.

    All that interlinking between us, as well as links from outside, result in all of us having Google Ranks of about 6 or 7. That is huge. Much of my traffic comes from searches (of course - I have more than 10,000 posts on many topics, some very long, using many different words and phrases). If I click to see a particularly interesting set of search keywords that brought someone to my blog, I discover that my blog is one of the top ten hits for that search string. And studies have shown that most people only check the top ten results when they do a search.

    Furthermore, such a significant rise in traffic and rank of scienceblogs.com resulted in all sorts of other deals. Choice posts of ours are linked from the New York Times science page. Likewise with the National Geographic site. Our blogs are sold on Amazon.com for Kindle. And the site is indexed not just in Google but also on Google News.

    This means not only that each one of us gets more direct traffic, and more potential indirect traffic from our SciBlings due to being on the network, but also an even larger and more powerful indirect traffic and visibility outside of the network. We are being closely watched, both by thousands of other bloggers and by the mainstream media. Whenever Scienceblogs.com explodes with a story, MSM takes note. It is not by chance that some of the first reactions to the Pepsi scandal, even faster than on individual's blogs, appeared in places like The Guardian and the Columbia Journalism Review. As Jay Rosen and Dave Winer noted in their weekly podcast, the distance between us at Sb and the global media is very small. We are not just a loose collection of individuals blogging just for fun any more.

    That is huge power. I keep mentioning this power every now and then (see this, this, this and this for good examples) because it is real. Sustained and relentless blogging by many SciBlings (and then many other bloggers who followed our lead) played a large role in the eventual release of 'Tripoli Six', the Bulgarian medical team imprisoned in Libya. Sustained blogging by SciBlings (and others who first saw it here) played a large part in educating the U.S.Senate about the importance of passing the NIH open access bill with its language intact. Blogging by SciBlings uncovered a number of different wrongdoings in ways that forced the powers-that-be to rectify them. Blogging by SciBlings brings in a lot of money every October to the DonorsChoose action. Sustained blogging by SciBlings forced SEED to remove the offending Pepsi blog within 36 hours. And if a bunch of SciBlings attack a person who did something very wrong, that person will have to spend years trying to get Google to show something a little bit more positive in top 100 hits when one googles their name (which is why I try to bite my tongue and sleep over it when I feel the temptation to go after a person). The power of the networks of individuals affects many aspects of the society, including the media.

    With great power comes great responsibility, and I am not sure that all of my SciBlings are aware of the extent of this power. A Scienceblog is not a personal diary or a hobby any more.

    Scienceblogs.com is Media

    Scienceblogs.com has always been the project of the Seed Media Group, thus at least a self-designated media organization. But since the moment our blogs got indexed in Google News we de facto became writers for a media organization. I am not sure some of my SciBlings really understood the importance of that day and how that changed who we are and what we do.

    Most of us here do not consider ourselves to be journalists or even have goals of wanting to become journalists. A few of us are. And a few of us are not sure what we are any more. But by virtue of being searchable on Google News we are journalists, whether we want it or not.

    Do we write news? Some of us sometimes do. But videos, cartoons, quotes, linkfests, etc. are considered not not to be News only if one adopts a very narrow and traditional sense of the term - reporting on an event that just happened. If you open a newspaper, you will see much more than News in that sense - there are obituaries, comic strips, classifieds, horoscopes, quotes, photos, poems, crossword puzzles....all of that is News in a sense that most consumers of news think: News is what comes in the Media.

    I think it is much more productive to think of media in a different way. Media is a means to disseminate and exchange information. Some of that information is important, some is informative, some is entertaining, some is educational, some is aesthetic, some is comic, some is analytic, some is opinionated, some is relevant to many people, some is relevant to just a handful, and yes, some of it may actually report on "what event just happened". Some of it is distributed by legacy media companies, some is distributed by individuals to each other.

    We here at Scienceblogs, by virtue of moving from our individual blogs to the network, have largely left the realm of "distributed by individuals to each other". We are the Media. Which means we need to be aware of it, and behave accordingly. This does not mean we have to change anything about our blogging. After all, we were picked and hired in the hope we would continue to do exactly what we were doing with our blogs before the move to Sb. But the same picture of a cat posted on Wordpress just for fun, as a hobby, becomes News once posted on Scienceblogs.com. Gotta keep that in mind at all times.

    We have built an enormous reputation, and we need to keep guarding it every single day. Which is why the blurring of lines between us who are hired and paid to write (due to our own qualities and expertise which we earned), and those who are paying to have their material published here is deeply unethical. Scientists and journalists share some common ethical principles: transparency, authenticity and truth-telling. These ethical principles were breached. This ruins our reputation, undermines our work, and makes it more unpalatable for good blogger to consider joining Sb in the future. See also Jennifer's post on this issue for a clear-headed take.

    Seed is not in magazine business any more

    Seed Media Group was founded in order to publish Seed Magazine. And it was a very nice magazine, glossy, lush, filled with awesome visualizations. Some articles were awesome, others a little flakier, but nothing nearly as bad as some other (don't make me name it again) popular science magazines managed to publish under their own banners. I liked Seed Magazine. My kids liked it. It was a cool, modern and novel way to design a pop-sci publication.

    In a happier time, before the meltdown of the media industry and then a general meltdown of the economy, Seed Magazine would have survived. But it was not meant to be. About a year ago, the last issue of Seed Magazine appeared on the newsstands. Its brand was not big enough, with enough longevity and reader loyalty, for any other corporation to step in and buy it out. It's gone.

    But if you think you are in the magazine business, if you think that your main product is a magazine, and if you have an office full of writers, editors and graphic designers, what do you do? You retain the mindset of a magazine publisher. Instead of rethinking the mission of the organization as a whole, Seed was only rethinking how to repackage Seed Magazine. They did not let the magazine die. They moved it online instead, retaining most or all of the editorial and writing staff. As Jay Rosen likes to quip about Washington Post, "the print guys won". The print mindset won.

    Yet, at the same time, Seed had a bunch of "side-projects", including some cool visualization stuff and yes, Scienceblogs.com. Some of those projects, including the magazine itself, fell by the wayside. But Scienceblogs.com was going from strength to strength:

    Looking at the graph (I know, PageRank measures one thing, other services measure it differently, but the take-home message is the same), it is obvious that the main product of the Seed Media Group is Scienceblogs.com.

    One could argue that traffic is not the proper measure, but I cannot think of a better one. If it was a scientific journal, having a middling traffic would not be so bad if other metrics, e.g., citations, media coverage, incoming links, proportion of visits that result in a PDF download, etc., are high. But there is no such thing to measure for a magazine. Impact of an article in a magazine is measured only by traffic, and traffic is also an important metric for advertisers.

    What used to be a fun side-project, Scienceblogs, became the centerpiece. Or so you'd think. But remember that the print guys won. Seed never realized that they were not in the magazine business any more. It is telling that some commenters during last week's fiasco said they never heard of Seed Magazine until now (I had not heard of it before I moved to Scienceblogs either). It is squirreled away on its obscure website, with miniature traffic, no brand recognition, not even much linking from Scienceblogs.com to it to drive at least some traffic there. We do not hear about new articles there to help promote them (except when Dave Munger writes one and tweets the link). If we are not aware that there are new articles in the magazine, how are others going to be?

    Several months ago (in the wake of a loss of a couple of our top bloggers) I suggested they move the magazine onto Scienceblogs as an "editor's blog" and let us pitch stories for it and use the existence of in-house editors to make our stories more polished than a usual blog post. It did not happen.

    What Seed Media Group is doing right now is trying to run a magazine, while treating Scienceblogs.com as a source of revenue. What Seed Media Group should be doing, what every media group should be doing, is become a tech-oriented company (one of the reasons PLoS is successful is that it is essentially a technology-rich publishing company, with an incredible and visionary IT/Web team working with the editorial team in driving innovation). Instead of trying to produce content in-house, which is expensive (all those salaries!), Seed should realize that they already have 80 (now more like 60 and getting smaller every day) producers of content. Barely paid producers of content. I know, it is really hard to fire all those wonderful people - but keeping them can just speed up the end-point so everyone ends up jobless in the end. If Seed Media Group (SMG) has money for employing twenty people, fifteen of those should be tech folks, driving innovation, serving Scienceblogs.com, making it bigger, better, more powerful.

    Everything at Seed should be set up to be in service of Scienceblogs: administrators, legal staff, editors, and most importantly a large, powerful, innovative technical staff. The experiment was run, the results are in, scienceblogs.com was shown to be a successful endeavor, and the rest of the experiments, magazine included, were failures and need to be thrown out and forgotten. I guess that many people in the office are emotionally invested in the magazine, but tough luck - the thing is a corpse. Mourn for a while, and move on.

    Who gets to be on Scienceblogs.com?

    A couple of years ago I heard the statistic that Seed got an average of seven applications per day to blog here. That is thousands of bloggers over the years to date!

    The network had a succession of several excellent Community Managers who made decisions on who to invite next. As the site grew and changed, their visions also changed, which determined what kinds of blogs they were looking for. Sometimes, they would accept a new blog, and let us know about it only about a day in advance. But in most cases they consulted with us. They would ask us to recommend who we thought were the best bloggers in a particular area, e.g., technology, infoscience, art, food, chemistry, etc., whatever they thought we lacked and needed more of at any particular time. And they would usually consider our recommendations and invite bloggers we respected. There were even times when we ganged up on them and relentlessly lobbied for a particular blogger to get invited and they would have to agree eventually.

    Not everybody who was invited said yes, either, but most did. And over the years there was a natural cycle - as new blogs got added, some of the older ones shut down or left. Often life and work interfered and people decided they could not continue blogging any more. Or just got tired of blogging. Some felt too much pressure to blog more frequently than they were comfortable with. Some bloggers fused their blogs into a single multi-author blog. Some invited co-bloggers to help. Some got better-paying gigs elsewhere. Some left due to personal conflicts with other bloggers. And now several have left due to the damaged reputation of the network that started with a sale of a blogging spot to a corporate entity.

    And more are leaving, and will be leaving, due to "Bion's effect":

    "You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.

    You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

    And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

    This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?"

    Yes, suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. This party is not as fun as it once was. Time to go.

    Scienceblogs.com - The Good

    Four years is eternity on the Web. But try to think back to early 2006 and understand how revolutionary that concept was at the time: grabbing a bunch of already popular bloggers, putting them all on the same site, paying them a little bit, and giving them complete editorial freedom. Anything goes! The editorial hand is in the initial choice of bloggers. Once you choose the people whose work you like, just let them lose.

    The existence of Scienceblogs.com as a one-stop shopping place for all things science resulted in the high visibility of science and of science blogging and spurred the explosive growth of the science blogosphere. In 2006, I could read every post by every science blogger in the world. Today, there are thousands out there that I don't even know about. And there are many other media companies who tried to emulate Seed and build their own networks, with, to be generous, mixed success so far.

    The Seed motto, "Science Is Culture", also contributed to opening science for the lay audience. Many of our readers are not scientists. The stereotypical image of scientists as socially inept recluses who speak in incomprehensible lingo was dispelled.

    In many ways my feeling that "who is not here will bite the dust" was not realized. Instead of building an isolated elitist community, we felt the responsibility to be generous, to constantly look for, seek out, link to and promote bloggers who are not on the network. Instead of acting as "we are elite bloggers producing elite content", we acted as "we are elite filters, finding and choosing the best content on the Web and showcasing it to everybody".

    Thus, much of what we did as SciBlings had, as a goal, the building of the science blogging community that is much broader than just our own internal network community. Nobody got rich from, and many put a lot of work into, the Open Laboratory anthologies which not only showcase the best of science blogging to the audience outside of the Web, but also promote new and upcoming bloggers outside the network. The ScienceOnline conferences (now a full-time job to organize, but still done for free on our own time) also contribute to a similar effort to get people on and off networks together. The DonorsChoose action every year brings us all together, as well as many other such actions. Scienceblogs.com was definitely a key player in the emergence and building of the science blogging community.

    Scienceblogs.com - The Bad

    The network has evolved over time. The initial offering was composed of bloggers who were already popular - they brought their readership with them. They just happened to be mostly bloggers - and this is probably why they were popular in the first place - whose blogging covered those aspects of "science is culture" that are quite controversial, from beating up on pseudoscience and medical quackery, to the relationship between science and religion, to the politics and politicization of science. This made for quite a lively discourse on the network, bringing up discussion topics that were important to have yet were considered taboo before. This did not sit well with all of the audience, many still squeamish about breaking of such cultural taboos (especially bold defenses of atheism), and the network got somewhat of a bad reputation in some circles, as a hotbed of godless, pinko-commie, liberal whateverwhatever people. That reputation, even during the most recent period when only about five out of 80 bloggers focused much on politics and/or religion, seems to persist.

    Since the continuous additions of popular bloggers did not add many new readers and traffic (they were all already reading here anyway), and as the erroneous perception which Sb-haters promulgated that "there is no science on scienceblogs.com" needed to be countered, Seed invited many bloggers who never touch controversial topics and only blog about science. They also invited a couple of bloggers who are openly religious and a couple of conservatives. More recently, several bloggers who joined were reputable science writers and journalists. A new idea was to try and pick up some very new and not-yet-established bloggers, especially very young ones with talent, and bring them here and help them grow.

    But none of this helped dispel the nefarious myths about Sb being an atheism network. In this effort to dilute politico-religious content with science content, Sb grew, in my opinion, too big. I think 80-something blogs with 90+ bloggers is too big. Internal rifts and formation of cliques was inevitable in such a large group, which led to some hidden and some very public fights, and resulted in some of our prominent bloggers leaving in a huff. This did not look good from the outside, I'm sure. And it did not work well for the bloggers' morale either.

    The chronic inability of the Seed management to communicate to and with bloggers did not help either (I feel the Overlords who tried to represent our interests were sidelined in the Seed newsroom). As a result, there is not much loyalty to the Seed brand. We are here for the network effect and traffic (and even the little money we get is important grocery money for some of us, including me), not because we are in love with Seed.

    This is not about Pepsi

    Two weeks ago, as most of you probably know, Seed started a new blog on Scienceblogs.com. It was to be not just sponsored, but authored by people from PepsiCo, a continuation of their Food Frontiers blog (go take a look). It was to be hosted, I believe, for three months, for a fee that PepsiCo would pay Seed (out of which, I guess, we bloggers would also get paid, perhaps even get up to date on payments - I just got my April check).

    We have hosted a few corporate-sponsored blogs before, but the main bloggers on them were either independent journalists or some of our own bloggers. Those blogs were introduced to us in the backchannels in advance, we were consulted, changes were made as needed, and some of us still protested on our blogs or wrote posts that are quite damning to those corporations, their shady corporate behavior, and their products.

    It is not well known - at least I did not see anyone mention it - that Seed tried to hire an outside freelance science journalist to host the Pepsi blog. Apparently, they could not find anyone. So, when the date came when they promised Pepsi they would start, they launched the blog without an independent host, with just Pepsi employees blogging. Huge mistake! They should have quickly asked some of us to pitch in that role, but instead they did not even tell us about it - the appearance of the blog was a total surprise to us all. Orac was the first one to spot it on the Last24Hour page and alerted the rest of us. Understandably, we all went berserk (and if you think our anger was strongly worded on our blogs, can you imagine what it looked like in the backchannels!?). This is a flagrant breach of the wall between content and advertising. A huge no-no in any kind of media. We are Media and this was the (un)ethical straw that broke the camel's back.

    Greg Laden was not the first one to think of it, but explained it the best the other day how the blog could have been made much more palatable to us and readers, if Seed just thought to ask us (even if that meant a delay of a couple of days before launching) to blog there. We have many bloggers here who could have contributed their expertise on various aspects of food. We have bloggers who could write with authority on obesity from physiological, medical, public health and sociological perspectives, on the chemistry of food, on poisons, on neuroscience of appetite, on nutrition, on raising one's own food, on evolution of food plants and domesticated animals, on endangered seafood, on the economics and politics of the food industry, on useless dietary supplements, on the reason why a piece of bread always falls on the buttered side, how to desecrate crackers, and even how to roast a zebra and share it with locals in Africa. Not to mention pie recipes! That could have been fun and informative. And if Pepsi scientists contributed as themselves, not as frontmen for the company, their perspective would have been interesting as well.

    Instead, we got an infomercial posing as one of us.

    It is completely irrelevant that it was Pepsi.

    It is completely irrelevant that it was about food.

    It is completely irrelevant that they never got to post anything on the blog before it was removed under the storm of criticism by us, readers and the media.

    It is completely irrelevant if their content was going to be good or bad.

    What is relevant is that a corporation paid to have a seat at the table with us. And that Seed made that happen.

    What is relevant is that this event severely undermined the reputation of all of us. Who can trust anything we say in the future?

    Even if you already know me and trust me, can people arriving here by random searches trust me? Once they look around the site and see that Pepsi has a blog here, why would they believe I am not exactly the same, some kind of shill for some kind of industry?

    Even if you know me and trust me, would you be able to trust any new addition to the network? All those thousands of bloggers who applied to Sb and did not get invited to join? What are they all thinking now about someone paying to blog here? Do you think anyone will ever apply again?

    Is Scienceblogs reputation permanently damaged?

    In the wake of the Pepsi scandal, other things started coming to light. Things like this and this and this and this, all adding up to the realization that Seed is not what it makes out itself to be. So yes, I think the reputation of Seed is permanently damaged. The quick reversal, under pressure, and removal of the Pepsi blog is not enough.

    Will it survive? I don't know. Probably it will, but smaller (this also depends on the biggest-traffic bloggers remaining). But the scienceblogs.com stable is shrinking rapidly, and I do not see it growing in size or reputation again any time soon. Without it - the only profitable enterprise in the SMG - I am not sure the company can survive. We won many big races, but our racing career is now over, and we should retire to some pleasure riding in the meadows now (not ready for the slaughterhouse yet, not me).

    Where will bloggers go?

    Some of the most prominent bloggers who have left - or will leave - can quite easily go solo. Since 2006, the Web ecosystem has evolved and now has mechanisms, including social networking sites, that can keep an already popular site from fading into oblivion by going solo. One's blog is now only one part of one's online presence.

    Others have been approached or will be approached (as soon as they make their leaving Sb official) by many other existing or incipient newtorks out there. Field Of Science is a new network, GenomesUnzipped is a new group-blog for people interested in genomics, All Geo may try to collect geobloggers, and Southern Fried Science new network may accumulate more ocean bloggers. Panda's Thumb offered evolution bloggers defecting from Scienceblogs.com to post there (I am not sure how to think about the division by topic - does it mean that general science networks can never attract a geoblogger and an ocean blogger any more?).

    SciBlogs NZ is a wonderful network, but limited by geography to New Zealand bloggers only. There are German Scienceblogs and Scienceblogs Brazil (in Portuguese). There is a growing North Carolina group science blog.

    Ira Flatow offered to host bloggers on Science Friday. And so did Wired UK (and US?) and apparently The Guardian as well. Scientific American is bound to jump into the fray, picking up defecting SciBlings. National Geographic has a blog network - I guess they are watching these developments as well. These media-run blogs/networks may well be changing their technological architecture as we speak in order to absorb multiple new bloggers they are trying to attract.

    Blogging on Huffington Post is an instant loss of credibility - a day of a Pepsi blog is nothing compared to years of pseudoscience, medical quackery, Creationism and Deepak Chopra's posts there. Nobody in their right mind would want to be associated with such a cesspit of anti-science.

    There are awesome blog/news networks for students of science journalism at NYU (Scienceline) and their counterparts in the UK, mainly at City University (Elements).

    Nature Network whose target audience are primarily scientists rather than lay public, and Science 2.0 (formerly Scientificblogging.org, not to be confused with the similarly named but very new and interesting Science 2.0 network that does more than just blogging) seem to be pretty open and approachable and have nice internal communities, but are essentially invisible from the outside. Likewise for Discovery Networks Blogs. The Psychology Today blogs is a very big network, but they do not seem to have anything like a community, and seem to be pretty unselective as to who they accept. I have heard of at least three new networks still in the making.

    But going to any of these is potentially a step down and a big loss of visibility and traffic. The only network that has recently started to come close to the clout of Scienceblogs.com is Discover blogs, but they have a specific type of blogger in mind and do not appear to have an appetite at this point to suddenly invite dozens of new bloggers - they seem to be building the network as a small, but highly elite place for people with some existing journalistic and professional writer cred. Definitely ones to watch!

    New scienceblogging ecosystem

    The potential step down and loss of visibility by leaving Sb may be an illusion. It makes sense in the existing ecosystem in which Scienceblogs.com is The Borg and everyone else is biting the dust. But the ecosystem is changing. Scienceblogs.com is rapidly losing reputation and bleeding bloggers. A number of other networks are absorbing these bloggers and adding more, growing in size and visibility very rapidly. Very soon - and I mean SOON as in weeks - instead of one big place to watch, there will be two dozen medium-sized places to watch. Instead of one site that everyone reads, there will be a number of sites that will have to read each other instead. Networks that get too large will be viewed, perhaps, with suspicion they are not selective enough. Networks that are too small will get lost and invisible in such a crowded ecosystem. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution - just the right size.

    Many science bloggers are personal friends, and many are also heavy users of social networks like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, so the ties will remain. The popularity of blog carnivals may come back up, at least temporarily, due to their well-established effect of building and maintaining the community. ResearchBlogging.org, apart from building respect for science bloggers in the outside world, is also beginning to serve as a center of the blogging community (and I hope it survives, funded by Seed or, if that becomes impossible at some point in the future, by whoever else can be lured to do so).

    Instead of one big network, there will be a network of networks. Nobody can afford now to ignore or be ignored by others. I bet we will see aggregators springing up that link to all the networks, perhaps networks will carry each other's RSS Feed widgets on sidebars to facilitate cross-linking and traffic between networks, and thus raise visibility of all. And the legacy media will have to adjust to the new ecosystem as well, and instead of just watching Scienceblogs.com, find a way to monitor all of the networks at the same time.

    When science blogosphere was young, existence of Scienceblogs.com was a boon - it lifted all the boats with it, made both the science and the science blogging visible and prominent. Today, having only one overgrown site so visible is toxic - it takes the oxygen out of the system, and makes the other networks and independent bloggers invisible. With the current process of Sb being cut to size, and concomitant process of other networks growing in size, visibility and relevance (as well as brand new networks springing up), we are reaching a point where being on Sb is not the pinnacle of one's potential science blogging career - it is one of many places where it is good to be.

    Many who are, for now, deciding to stay on Sb, are doing so because they are terrified of becoming invisible by going solo. But in the new emerging ecosystem, going solo is not necessarily going to mean invisibility. People who go solo will still be a part of the community - yes, the same science blogging community that Scienceblogs.com was a key to building in the first place.

    Going solo also makes one "fair game". Other networks will not approach Sciblings who are not officially leaving as they do not want to tread on Adam Bly's territory or be seen as poaching. But they will approach people who go solo. And they will also approach independent bloggers who were never on a network before - because those bloggers are really good and have been left out so far, because there are not enough Sb defectors to build sufficiently large networks just out of them, and because they do not want the perception that they are growing and building networks entirely on the ashes of Seed.

    A growing number of networks and growing visibility of all the networks, also means that bloggers will have many choices. Seed is not the only game in town any more. Some networks pay bloggers, others don't. Some have advertising, some don't. Some have posting frequency requirements, others don't. Some are run by for-profit organizations, others by non-profits, and others are bloggers' cooperatives. Some have complete editorial freedom, some have limited restrictions. Some have excellent tech support, some lousy or none at all. Some are smaller and highly selective as to who they invite, others are big and also accept bloggers who are not really up to par. Thus, each blogger has a range of choices and the ability to choose according to what each individual finds important for their own goals. And those bloggers who think of this as a hobby and do not want to be seen as Media, can easily go solo and remain connected to the ecosystem in a variety of ways.

    What will I do?

    My first impulse when Pepsi blog suddenly and surprisingly showed up on the homepage was to bail out immediately.

    But I decided instead to take some time to think and decide. My wife also told me to wait and watch the events unfold instead of saying anything myself. Wise.

    Not saying anything publicly also made me open to others - I was approached by many with questions, fears, confusions, and their own plans. I have heard a whole lot from various people - who is courting them, where they are going to go, what new networks are being secretly built, etc. which gives me a pretty good lay of the land. I have a pretty good grasp of what is going on out there, I think (though I can be surprised, I'm sure). Most people are quite secretive about their plans, and I will NOT reveal anything that anybody told me until they themselves go public, but I am also not ready to completely reveal my own plans just yet.

    After agonizing for almost two weeks, I finally made a decision. I will leave Scienceblogs.com, effective today.

    I am not making this decision lightly. A number of factors played a part in this. On one hand there are negative factors - the loss of reputation by Sb, the complete lack of technical support here, the deflated morale of bloggers here, and the indications that all the recent changes at Seed are not a sign of losing the print mindset, which makes it unlikely that meaningful changes will happen. There is also a feeling that SMG is financially a sinking ship. On the other hand are positive factors - I am excited by the swift evolution of the new science blogging ecosystem and want to position myself well within it. I feel that this is also an opportunity to make something better once the dust settles. But the main reason I am leaving is the ethical breach that has seriously placed our reputation in jeopardy.

    Unlike some others, I have nothing personal against Adam Bly. We have met once and he seems to be a really nice guy. We loved going to the New York City meetups in the early years and meeting with him there and being hosted at his house. He has interesting ideas and I think his goals are quite in sync with my own - increasing the prominence and relevance of science in our society. I just think that he is consulting with (and sometimes hiring) people with the old legacy media mindset, getting outdated ideas from them, and not being aware how the world has changed even in the past four years and how those changes require a much more dramatic change in direction.

    I also want to acknowledge how much being on Scienceblogs.com has meant to me both personally and professionally. This is where I got my job, many other gigs, invitations to give talks, preview copies of books, and a general prominence and reputation in the worlds of science, publishing and the Web. Without Scienceblogs.com, there probably would never be Open Laboratory and ScienceOnline. I have made many fast friends here, both SciBlings and readers, and I am optimistic that these friendships will continue, wherever any one of us end up blogging.

    Though many other solutions are possible for me, I have decided that I want to be solo for a little while - I want to see who approaches me and with what kinds of offers. Perhaps something great comes out of it. With my wife on disability leave our finances are shot, and I need to find a way to get paid for all the things I do so I can support my family. And even if no good offers come about, at least when I make up (and announce) my final decision, I will be sure I had all the necessary information I need to make the best decision for myself.

    So, farewell, Scienceblogs, it was honor to be a part of this community for so long.

    You can find me, in the meantime, at http://coturnix.wordpress.com/. I will continue blogging at everyONE blog and Science in the Triangle blog as well. And you can follow me on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, so you will know when I make other moves in the future.

    Read the comments on this post...
  • Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far
    12:40pm | Jul 19, 2010

    The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.

    The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.

    You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.

    Read the rest of this post... |
  • Clock Quotes
    8:54am | Jul 19, 2010

    At bottom every man know well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

    - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

    Read the comments on this post...

ChemSpider

  • Adding the SORD Database (Selected Organic Reac...
    10:02pm | Feb 3, 2012
    We will soon be depositing data from the SORD databases (Selected Organic Reactions Database) onto ChemSpider. This will be done as two separate but related datasets until the SORD data source: Reactants and Products. If you don’t know what SORD is then who better to explain than Dick Wife, the “host” of the SORD database. Dick wrote [...]
  • Learn Chemistry Wiki is launched
    2:36pm | Jan 4, 2012
    The RSC’s objective is to advance the chemical sciences, not only at a research level but also to provide tools to train the next generation of chemists. ChemSpider contains a lot of useful information for students learning Chemistry but there is also a lot of information which is not relevant to their studies which might [...]
  • How to use ChemSpider webservices from Knime
    5:59pm | Dec 21, 2011
    KNIME is an open-source data integration, processing, analysis, and exploration platform which can be used to create workflows to analyse data. We have experimented with adding a node to a project which would call the ChemSpider webservices to perform a simple search on it and the instructions below outline how to reproduce our experimentation. This [...]
  • ChemSpider plugin for IDBS ELN
    9:47am | Dec 8, 2011
    The functionality of electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) and that of ChemSpider overlap to a certain extent – both store chemical information including structures, data, spectra and reactions. However, the focus of most ELNs is to manage, track and audit that data, and that of ChemSpider is to publish and disseminate it to the world. We [...]
  • How to use ChemSpider webservices when programm...
    5:26pm | Nov 18, 2011
    Recently I have been programming a java plug-in from which I needed to call the ChemSpider webservices, and I found that this wasn’t as straightforward as I was expecting, so I thought I would post how to do it in case it’s useful for anyone else who wants to do likewise. The basic method I [...]

Coastwatch

Conifer Reproductive Biology

De Rerum Natura

  • Testing
    6:28pm | Jun 20, 2011
    Testing...
  • PICS-Ord: unlimited coding of ambiguous regions...
    1:37am | Jan 26, 2011
    I’ve had the good fortune of having some papers published recently. The first one is a methodology paper concerning a way of extracting phylogenetic information from regions of multiple sequence alignments that are full of indels and difficult to align:...
  • Calix Cari 2010: End of Regular Season
    4:00am | Dec 22, 2010
    I haven’t been keeping up with my Calix Cari polls this year for collage football. But now that the regular season has ended, I have found time to produce one. The events of this season have been rather unpredictable. Of...
  • Ngila 1.3 Released
    4:15am | Dec 9, 2010
    It has been a long time coming, but I have finally released Ngila 1.3. This version fixes a few bugs and includes many new features. Use CMake for compilation and installation New scaling option enabled by default (identical sequences default...
  • The Working Life
    4:16pm | Oct 26, 2010
    I apologize for things being slow on this blog. I’ve been knee deep in programming, manuscripts, grant proposals, and teaching. I’m hoping to have results to share in the near future. In the mean time, you can follow some of...

Duke Lemur Center

Duke Research

Duke Research (blog)

  • We've MOVED!
    5:03pm | May 19, 2010
    We're changing channels here at Duke Research blog -- moving from the friendly confines of Blogger to a Duke server inside the Duke Research site.We'll have the same great action-news team, (well, minus Monte the Weatherman, who has retired) and the same great coverage. Please tune the RSS feeds on your mobile devices and neural implants accordingly.Vansh and Becca are off campus this summer,
  • College Substance Abuse Is a Lot More Than Alco...
    7:43pm | May 18, 2010
    Guest post from Jamese Slade, NCCU Summer internUnderage drinking and drug use may not be a big deal to most college students, but these behaviors can have effects that will last a lifetime.At a two-day forum on college student drinking and drug use sponsored by the Center for Child and Family Policy, drug abuse researchers touched on the issues of not only alcohol use, but also marijuana, and
  • Build-A-Brain Workshop
    9:14pm | May 12, 2010
    That snap-crackle-pop sound you hear around a newborn human's head is the baby's brain being assembled at an alarming rate. The manufacturing of brain cells and getting them wired into meaningful circuits in the first months of life lays a foundation for abilities – and deficits – that seem to last a lifetime. And though the program is remarkably robust, parts of it can be derailed.A
  • Bonobo Business
    5:32am | Apr 16, 2010
    Do you know what a bonobo is?Only about 10% of people do, according to Duke evolutionary anthropology professor Brian Hare. By comparison, roughly 90% of people know what a gorilla is.Bonobos have many remarkable qualities, including the fact they “are the only really peaceful ape,” according to Hare. “They don’t kill each other.” Bonobos are more closely related to humans than any other kind of
  • Bouncing Off The Walls
    1:35pm | Apr 15, 2010
    Guest post from Cara Bonnett, Office of Information Technology No, it’s not your imagination: Those clouds really are following you, and the sunflowers are waving.Students walking past the huge media wall at the Link in Perkins Library may not realize that the tiled display is responding to their movements. But thanks to Duke researchers and computer science students, they now can interact with

EagerEyes

Forth Go

  • Tie-Dye Soda Ash Experiment
    5:32pm | Aug 20, 2011
    One of the steps in tie-dying is to soak the shirt in a “fixer” solution of sodium carbonate, also known as soda ash. I think of soda ash as a dye-cotton binding agent. My informal experiment is to see the … Continue reading →
  • 18 Days of Tie-Dye
    10:05pm | Jul 24, 2011
    I finished my summer run of consecutive tie-dye day earlier this month with a final count of 18 different shirts in 18 consecutive days, beating last year’s record of 16. I could have done a few more, but I imagine … Continue reading →
  • Google Code Jam 2011 Round 2
    9:09pm | Jun 4, 2011
    My luck ran out in Round 2 of the Google Code Jam 2011. I placed 626th but needed to be in the top 500 to advance. At least I qualified for a T-shirt for being in the top 1000. There … Continue reading →
  • Chapel Hill Flooding Video
    10:13pm | May 29, 2011
    I was eating lunch downtown at Mint with Joe and Anli when the heavy rains rolled in last Friday. We tried to wait it out, but it didn’t follow the usual pattern of a brief summer storm. After about an … Continue reading →
  • Google Code Jam 2011 Round 1
    1:24am | May 25, 2011
    Round 1 of the Google Code Jam 2011 contest was last week-end. I stayed up Friday night for the first of three sessions for round 1 qualification. The top 1000 in each two-and-a-half-hour session advance to round 2. I was … Continue reading →

Hard science

Julian Lombardi's Blog

  • Julian Lombardi's Blog Has Moved
    2:20am | May 20, 2009
    I've moved my blog to another address and will no longer post here. Please go to julianlombardi.blogspot.com to see all my posts, both old and new.

    -Julian
  • Collaborative CAD in Cobalt!
    11:50am | Dec 11, 2008


    Thanks again to the work of Aik-Siong Koh and his team, Cobalt now makes it possible for users to work in a deeply collaborative CAD environment. This video shows how two Cobalt users on separate computers can work with relatively sophisticated CAD capabilities over a LAN. This newly-implemented collaborative CAD capability in Cobalt opens up a wide range of possibilities for engineers and others at a distance to develop sophisticated simulations and architectures in Cobalt worlds. The ability to develop animated content within a full-featured virtual world CAD environment sets Cobalt apart from other virtual world technologies in a very significant way.
  • VNC in Cobalt!
    1:16pm | Nov 22, 2008


    Rajeev Lochan has just been successful in getting VNC to work within a shared Cobalt space! VNC is a graphical desktop sharing system which uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. This is a big breakthrough for our open project. It means that a Cobalt-based VNC client can connect to a VNC server on any other operating system. Cobalt users will soon be able to view and interact with remote applications (including full featured web browsers) or even collaboratively access remote desktops within the Cobalt application. Because the VNC protocol can use a lot of bandwidth, we still have some optimization to deal with - but this progress is great to see. Thank you Rajeev!
  • Immersive Workspaces
    10:37pm | Oct 21, 2008


    Linden Lab has announced that its now going to be moving into the enterprise 3D collaboration space. It recently announced a new product called "Immersive Workspaces" which is basically an area in Second Life set aside for corporate meetings. That more secure area represents "a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland." Their intent is to develop a complete collaboration experience for the enterprise. I guess that is Linden Lab's attempt to try and ensure that business meetings are not disrupted by griefers or by unwelcome barrages of flying penises. Looks like the enterprise virtual worlds space is getting a bit more crowded. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
  • Another KMZ Import
    11:23pm | Oct 19, 2008


    Another test of the new KMZ importer from Aik-Siong Koh. Note that the textures are mapping nicely onto the relatively complex model! Soon we will be able to import lots of content from Google's 3D Warehouse into Cobalt. That will be nice...

Mister Sugar

  • One word to start the new year: home
    1:54am | Jan 3, 2012

    At Atlantic.com, Julie Beck has an interesting essay on the Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much:

    But while it’s human nature to want to have a place to belong, we also want to be special, and defining yourself as someone who once lived somewhere more interesting than the suburbs of Michigan is one way to do that.

    Beck explains that her house if filled with pictures and references to past places she’s lived. My house is similar, with photos of my Peace Corps community of Liro Village in the South Pacific, music from my time in Honolulu (Olinda Road by Hapa the best), bins of journals and term papers during my studies at John Carroll University or reporting notebooks from my early years as a magazine editor.

    See my Travels page for a map of my round-the-globe trip that inludes some of my past homes.

    But North Carolina is home for me now, as I noted in my post 10 years in NC, 15 years in marriage, 20 years in love.

    Still, our families are spread far and wide, and Erin and I often talk into the night about where home would best be for us now, next year, in five or ten or more years on. My dad’s 20th marathon (he and I and my brother, Nick, ran our first together in 1993, and I would have loved to be with him for this race; Nick was there this time, too) and my brother-in-law Mike’s sudden heart surgery — he’s blogging his recovery at ShaughnessyMD.com — made this discussion even more timely.

    As much as we want to be nearer our families, I keep reminding myself that my ancestors left their homes and familiies, sailed across the ocean and started a new life in America.

    I was thinking about that on Christmas Day, when I set out on a walk of my own through the neighborhood, into the woods of the future Moniese Nomp county park and along the new Jones Creek Parkway. It was a beautiful, warm day, and just what I needed to still myself at the end of a busy year and on the cusp of an intense month ahead. As I finished, I was walking up a path beneath my street, and I looked up to see my house.

    “I want to live in this house for a very long time,” I said to myself. I’m very happy here.

    One of the reasons we chose this big house is because we wanted to entertain our friends, neighbors and community. We did that over the last couple of weeks in a series of bagel brunches. Today’s was a gathering of some of my BlogTogether friends, just a great group of people on a relaxing day off enjoying each other’s company.

    That’s the psychology of home for me.

    You've got mail

  • Finding inspiration for a new mistersugar.com
    2:18am | Dec 21, 2011

    As things slow down for the holidays — ScienceOnline2012 planning notwithstanding — I’m going to take some time to rework the design of mistersugar.com. This site has had the same design since 2006, and web design has gone through quite a few trends since.

    I’ve spent the past few months monitoring Wordpress themes and site templates, at WooThemes (we use the Canvas theme for MedicineNews and the Kaboodle theme for ScienceOnline2012.com), ThemeForest and others — mostly lots of portfolio sites and sliders and same-looking business pages.

    I’ve also seen quite a few blogs going the simple way: inessential.com and marco.org and CarpeAqua and Zero Distraction are reduced to a single column of text.

    Anil Dash also has a simple blog — like the others listed above, he’s a great writer and a thought leader to follow – on which he spotlighted Bootstrap, a design toolkit for rapid site development. See his post Bootstrap Rising. A similar framework is Foundation by Zurb.

    Last week, I played a bit with TypeKit and adjusted the fonts of my blog. In the next week or two, I hope to rework the site on Bootstrap.

    I’m also experimenting with Dave Winer’s Radio2 minimal blogging tool for running a linklog. I’ve run both my blog and my Sugarcubes linklog with Textpattern, but Radio2 might help me better coordinate my linklog and the links I share on Twitter. I’ve got Radio2 and OPML Editor mostly figured out; just need to find the way to point a subdomain to Radio2.

    So, anyway, as I move into my 12th year of blogging, I’m excited to revamp the site. Stay tuned.

  • Awareness of situational conversation
    7:20pm | Nov 25, 2011

    The other day, in a discussion with other social media leaders at Duke, someone remarked that college students think it’s weird when adults respond to their online conversations. I’ve heard this before, but I’ve had a hard to buying the argument that we should be cautious in engaging with young people online.

    I’ve spent the last week thinking this over, my thoughts rooted in a childhood experience: I was in second grade (in Caldwell, Idaho), and one morning was excused to use the restroom. On my way back to the classroom, I passed two teachers in the hallway, talking. When one of them mentioned a trending topic, I blurted out, “Star Wars, I want to see that movie.”

    One of the teachers reacted immediately, grabbing my arm, marching me over to a bench and sitting me down. With one hand, she squeezed my cheeks. “Don’t you ever interrupt a conversation like that again,” she barked.

    I learned my lesson about impertinence from that reprimand. But I also became attuned to situational conversations — what I think of as dialogue in public spaces — listening attentively whether someone is speaking directly to me or whether the conversation is between others.

    This is eavesdropping, clearly. But when is eavesdropping impertinent?

    I asked my brother-in-law, Tom Michael (he’s general manager of Marfa Public Radio, and is a great radio conversationalist) to consider this situation: You and I are sitting at a busy outdoor cafe, talking, and we’re aware — consciously or subconsciously — that others around us may be passively or actively listening to our conversation. How do you feel when someone leans over and says something related to our conversation?

    Tom: Depends if they offer us directions because they heard us trying to figure out the best way to the outlet mall or because they heard us talking about a friend who is going to have surgery next week.

    So, yes, clearly there are lines that can be crossed. Situational conversation depends on the situation, the location, the topic, the people. An empty cafe and someone sitting down close by to intentionally listen in is an affront. Or we whisper, talk cryptically or in Bislama to lessen the chance that eavesdroppers will understand.

    But I’ve also had some wonderful conversations because people sitting by offer their ear, their perspective, their thoughts.

    Now take the question to social media, where the tools we use to converse — Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others — give us a spectrum of privacy settings, allowing us to determine who exactly can listen in. Granted, the default for most social media tools is full public exposure, but given the ability to make a conversation private, can we assume that what’s public is fair game to be listened to and responded to?

    I’m not sure I have all the answers, but I’m posting this on my blog that is open to the public, and I’m hoping you’ll listen in and join the conversation.

    Afterword

    Much of my online activity, and the supporting events I’ve organized (like ScienceOnline2012 and Michael Ruhlman’s recent visit to Chapel Hill and Durham) has been to facilitate conversation. Recently, I’ve seen and heard others realizing that the great potential of social media is to get people together in face-to-face gatherings.

    We’ve been promoting that for years with our BlogTogether events. Social media, to me, has always been best to say, “Let’s get together.”

  • Further thoughts on friendship and passion
    6:31pm | Nov 6, 2011

    Erin kindly left two of the upstairs bathrooms for me to clean, and since I’ve spent much of the past 48 hours sleeping, slumbering, napping or otherwise unconscious — more about that later — while Erin efficiently scrubbed, folded and arranged our home to look clean and shiny, I gathered up the cleaning supplies, some old towels and the iPad opened to the Monti podcast.

    While I listened to Robert Bland and Dorothy Clark talk about love and fatherhood and race relations, I was struck by the passion with which Jeff Polish has executed his dream of facilitating storytelling in North Carolina.

    I first met Jeff in 2008, when I was talking about a storyblogging idea and he was already getting his storytellers lined up for the Monti. I got to his second show, in May 2008 — Frank Stasio, Randall Kenan, Tanya Olson and others on the theme ‘travels’ — literally the last one in the door, and I’ve been his biggest fan since.

    I’m looking through my Moleskine notebook now, and see that I asked myself what story I might one day tell; the tale of Geo the lost dog on Paama is one I’ve been working at ever since, writing and rewriting a little bit after every Monti show. This week’s show gave me double inspiration to finish. I had told Jeff that Michael Ruhlman was returning to Durham, and he’d be a good storyteller. Lo and behold, Michael was up on stage at Motorco Music Hall on Tuesday telling about how the CIA rescued him as a writer and made him as a chef, and about the passion for perfection that’s made Thomas Keller the best chef in the land. (Erin and I sat next to Donna Turner Ruhlman, Michael’s wife; she contributed the photos to Ruhlman’s Twenty. It was very nice to spend this time with her.)

    Closer to home, Andrea Reusing is the best chef in the Southeast, as determined by the Beard Foundation this year. Andrea had Erin, Jeff, Michael, Donna and me — and a host of others — in her Lantern restaurant Wednesday night for a special dinner. My previous post is about that dinner, and doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the menu, the service, the setting. Clearly, Andrea has a passion for her work; buy a copy of her book, Cooking in the Moment and you’ll get a glimpse as to why.

    At that dinner, in one room, three individuals who inspire me with their passion: Michael with his writing, Jeff with his storytelling, Andrea with her cooking. I spoke a few words to explain why our stars had aligned, telling a short story about how my mother taught me to reach out and ask friends or strangers to gather and participate. With ScienceOnline2012 looming, and me working late into each night on the details and logistics of this annual conference — hence the utter exhaustion that’s knocked me out this weekend — I’ve been reminding my friends that this is my passion (I call it, alternately, the BlogTogether and Long Table ethos). When Michael stood up and told the room that “Anton is an angel, a true angel,” I think he was acknowledging my passion.

    Look, and you’ll see passionate people all around.

    Yesterday, my friend Wayne Sutton must have been thinking about this, because he tweeted this tag 13 times: #passion.

  • Still savoring the Lantern dinner with Andrea R...
    6:18am | Nov 6, 2011

    Michael Ruhlman was in the Triangle this week, telling a story at The Monti, signing copies of Ruhlman’s Twenty at A Southern Season, talking cookbooks on WUNC and headlining a special dinner at Lantern.

    The talented and lovely Andrea Reusing, winner of the 2011 James Beard Award for Best Chef Southeast, (here’s a photo I snapped of her back in 2007) and her team at Lantern created a most memorable meal (full menu, with wine pairings, is here), with an amazingly diverse set of tastes and textures. As Michael pointed out, serving all this amazing food family style was a brilliant way to facilitate the meal (the Long Table spirit, I’d say).

    I had my very first raw oyster — Nassawadox oysters with hot sauce and North Carolina horseradish — and loved the softness (I took three bites). The dainty tea eggs with sichuan salt and scallion were perfect, and I wanted to ask if there were more in the kitchen, but before I could I was savoring the rilettes with “ume” salted cherries and the crispy Chapel Hill Creamery pork belly with 5-spice and pickled pumpkin. The crispy whole puffer fish with Edward’s country ham, braised cabbage and oyster mushrooms was unique, and fun to eat. I’d order that for lunch every day if I could — Andrea gets a lot of this fish from Virginia, and talked with us about sustainable seafood and other local ingredients.

    At the dinner were quite a few local suppliers to Lantern. I sat next to Richard Teague, whose High Rock Farm in Gibsonville, NC produces chestnuts, pecans, blackberries and raspberries. Richard is a retired chemical engineer living in a restored historical farmhouse built in 1807, and he’s got a lot of chestnuts, from which he’s beginning to produce gluten-free chestnut flour. Also at our table was Phoebe Lawless, whose Scratch Bakery is pie heaven.

    Dessert was ginger fizz with muscadine grape creamsicle and homemade candied ginger. Mmm, mmm, mmm. That was created by Monica Segovia-Welsh, who works at Lantern and bakes bread with her husband in a wood-fired stove at their Chicken Bridge Bakery. Here’s Monica serving Bora Zivkovic the roasted Moulard duck with kasu, white sweet potato, and pickled apple and shallots:

    So, an amazing night I won’t soon forget. Many thanks to Michael for traveling to North Carolina and to Andrea for delighting our appetites and to the many producers of food and cooking who make life so delicious.

    UPDATE: Even though Andrea and I only started discussing this event a few weeks ago, she and her sous chef, Miguel Torres, explained to us that the meal had really begun 18 months prior, when they’d first put up a ham for curing in Andrea’s basement. Talk about slow cooking!

    UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention the best part of my conversation with Richard Teague. When he learned that I’d grown up in DeKalb, Illinois, he told me that his late wife was a member of the Ellwood family of DeKalb. My grandparents lived across the street from the historic Ellwood House, and I once read an essay as part of an Independence Day ceremony on the front lawn.

Nicholas Insider

Primate Diaries

  • Now at Scientific American
    6:13pm | Jul 24, 2011
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  • The Primate Diaries Has Moved to Science Blogs
    1:37am | Jul 2, 2009
    My new home is at http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries.

    Update your RSS feed by clicking here and I look forward to hearing from you on the comments page!
  • Nature is calling . . .
    3:05pm | Apr 10, 2009


    The Primate Diaries has now been picked up by the journal Nature's online network. Click on the RSS button below to update your feed and click the image above to see the new site.

  • Superorganisms and Group Selection
    11:58pm | Apr 3, 2009
    Unicolonial ants pose challenge to "selfish gene" theory.


    Unicolonial ants, such as these Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), are genetically unrelated but will cooperate to defeat a much larger adversary.
    Source: Alex Wild / Live Science

    ResearchBlogging.orgIt has been a mainstay of evolutionary theory since the 1970s. Natural selection acts purely on the level of the individual and any cooperation observed between organisms merely hides a selfish genetic motive. There have been two pioneering theories to explain cooperation in the natural world given this framework: the first was William Hamilton's (1964) theory of kin selection and the second was Robert Trivers' (1971) theory of reciprocal altruism.

    However, both of these scenarios break down where it comes to unicolonial ants. In a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (subscription required) Heikki Helantera, of the University of Sussex, and colleagues at Rice University have investigated how previous theories to explain cooperation don't apply for these unique supercolonies.
    Unicolonial ants carry polydomy [multiple nests in a supercolony that all individuals rotate through] and polygyny [multiple queens in one nest] to extremes. Colonies are huge, each being a network of hundreds or thousands of nests, each with multiple queens. There is no worker aggression, and there is free movement among nests on a vast scale. The energy that might have been put into fighting and territoriality flows into the common good, more ants.
    Such a concept, a form of genuine anarchism in the animal world, was thought to be impossible given existing theory. These ants live in colonies where relatives exist but, with so much migration throughout a network stretching thousands of kilometers, each ant worker is mostly surrounded by total strangers that share none of their genes. Only one other species has ever been known to organize themselves in such a fashion (and if you're reading these words right now you know who you are).

    To understand how unicolonial ants have come to be the way they are, we must first understand what they're not. Kin selection has proposed that cooperation will emerge in groups that are made up of close relatives. Hamilton's rule, beautiful in its simplicity, proposed that cooperation occurs when the cost to the actor (C) is less than then the benefit to the recipient (B) multiplied by the genetic relatedness between the two (r). This equation is written out simply as rB > C.


    Lion siblings often cooperate as teams and benefit through kin selection.
    Source: Scotch Macaskill / Wildlife Pictures.com

    To put this into context: an alpha male lion and his brother share half of their genes, so have a genetic relatedness of 0.5. Suppose this brother recognizes that the alpha male is getting old and could easily be taken down. If so, the brother could potentially have eight additional cubs (just to pull out an arbitrary number). But, instead, that brother decides to help the alpha male to maintain his position in the pride and, as a result, the alpha ends up having the eight additional cubs himself while the brother only has five. The brother has lost out on 3 potential cubs. But, even so, because he assisted his brother he has still maximized his overall reproductive success from a genetic point of view: (0.5) x 8 = 4 > 3. He could have attempted to usurp his brother and, perhaps, had the eight cubs himself but he wouldn't have been in any better of a position as far as his genes were concerned.

    Reciprocal altruism follows this same basic idea, but proposes a mechanism that could work for individuals that are unrelated. In this scenario, cooperation occurs when the cost to the actor (C) is less than the benefit to the recipient (B) multiplied by the likelihood that the cooperation will be returned (w) or wB > C. This has been demonstrated among vampire bats who regurgitate blood into a stranger's mouth if they weren't able to feed that night. Previous experience has shown the actor that they're likely to get repaid if they ever go hungry one night themselves. This theory requires that individuals be part of a single group, with low levels of immigration and emigration, so that group members will be likely to encounter each other on a regular basis.

    Previously, it was argued that all ants followed an extreme form of kin selection. Because of their unique process of reproduction females develop from fertilized eggs and have paired chromosomes (that is, one from each parent). However, males develop from unfertilized eggs and only have a single chromosome from their mother. As a result, female workers share up to 75 percent of their genes with sisters but only 50 percent with their mother (or their own offspring, if they were to reproduce). Worker ants therefore have greater genetic success by not reproducing but, instead, helping to raise and protect their legion of closely related sisters.


    Ant reproduction gives rise to genetic sisterhood.
    Source: Unattributed

    This explanation has been somewhat clouded given more recent evidence that queens engage in polyandry (mating with multiple males). A queen will frequently mate with up to five different males and store their combined sperm, around 100 million of them, in a special compartment called the spermatheca. By releasing a single sperm at a time the queen can control the number of eggs she lays. However, because there are multiple fathers, the genetic relationship between the female worker ants is reduced. Female workers may therefore only be related by 25 percent with the females they're helping to raise. Why would female workers continue to be non-reproductive and help rear distant relatives when they could have twice the reproductive success by having their own offspring? While there are strategies female workers employ to maximize their own reproductive success (like preferrentially rearing eggs that they are more closely related to or, in some rare cases, reproducing themselves) it still remains puzzling why ants have been so successful given this seeming contradiction.

    If you add to this the realities of multiple queens in a single nest (polygyny) and supercolonies that are composed of thousands of such nests (polydomy), the problem becomes insurmountable. If worker ants share zero percent of their genes with those they're cooperating with, as is the case in these unicolonies, then why cooperate? What do they have to gain?

    This is the problem that Helantera and colleagues are seeking to understand in their latest paper. While the authors emphasize a range of possible explanations, I want to focus on just one that has been generating a great deal of interest in the last few years: group selection.
    The extreme cooperation of unicolonial ants has been suggested to be an example of selection occurring on levels higher than the individual, such as the superorganism, group or even population.
    Group selection is the idea that, under certain circumstances, genes will be selected for because they benefit the overall success of the group rather then simply the individual. While it is usually assumed that these populations will have a high level of relatedness (making the promotion of the group an extended form of kin selection) the authors suggest a scenario in which group selection could apply even among unrelated group members.


    Giant ants terrorize humanity in Them!.
    Source: Warner Bros.

    This is a possibility I like to call Ronald Reagan's Alien Invasion Hypothesis. In a speech before the United Nations on Sept. 21, 1987 Reagan stated that:
    In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
    So under this possibility a common threat to all colony members would outweigh the low level of genetic similarity because, unless everyone pulls together, the entire group is in jeopardy. If one colony was competing with a rival colony then selection for individual selfishness could drive the population to extinction while selection for cooperation would allow the colony to thrive.
    Under this view, extant unicolonial populations are the ones that have not yet succumbed to selfishness. Relatedness and mutual policing select against selfishness in non-unicolonial populations, but stop applying when relatedness decreases to zero. . . [However], constraints arising from the natural history of the species or pleiotropic effects of selfish genes, might prevent selfish genotypes from arising even under zero relatedness.
    This cooperation could then continue long after the initial threat was gone under the force of phylogenetic inertia. Perhaps, in the future, selection would cause the unicolony to break into smaller, more genetically similar colonies once the impetus for group selection no longer exists? Or perhaps the benefits of cooperating with strangers simply outweighs the costs of competition and natural selection has produced a genuinely altruistic society?


    Unicolonial cooperation has inspired activist art such as this print from the Beehive Collective.
    Source: Beehive Collective

    At the current time there are 31 known unicolonial ant populations around the globe. This is a small minority given the more than 12,000 described species. However, given that research on unicolonial ants is so new, there is still a great deal of research that needs to take place concerning this unique experiment of the natural world. At the very least, unicolonies provide us with a source of inspiration and the ability to marvel at the amazing beauty and diversity of the natural world. With the knowledge that stable supercolonies composed of strangers continue to thrive in nature, perhaps there's something we could learn from those creatures that first invented this approach.

    References:

    Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I and II. — Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-16 and 17-52

    Trivers, R.L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology. 46: 35-57.

    Helantera, H., Strassman, J.E., Carrillo, J., Queller, D.C. (2009). Unicolonial ants: where do they come from, what are they and where are they going? Trends in Ecology and Evolution. doi:10.1016/j.tree.s009.01.013
  • Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions
    5:15pm | Mar 31, 2009
    Anup Shaw over at Global Issues has collected an exhaustive collection of recent analysis on the loss of biodiversity in the last few years.

    As I wrote in my recent post Rivalry Among the Reefs, the loss of up to 1/3 of coral reefs in recent years could result in unprecedented extinctions of ocean biodiversity.

    While occupying only 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans, coral reefs sustain 25 percent of species diversity; an oceanographic public works project that has been in existence for 3.5 billion years. . . Current estimates are that one-third of the world’s coral reefs are in imminent danger of extinction. In an international survey of these most diverse ecosystems in our oceans, researchers determined that global climate change is increasing the average temperature of the Earth’s oceans. This is killing the photosynthetic algae that has adapted into a pristine symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Coral bleaching on a global scale is the result and mass extinction will be the inevitable conclusion unless this trend is reversed.
    But loss of biodiversity in the oceans is only one region currently experiencing crisis. The collection of studies and warnings from experts around the world that Anup has gathered are truly staggering. See below for a sample of some of what he posts:

    Already resources are depleting, with the report showing that vertebrate species populations have declined by about one-third in the 33 years from 1970 to 2003. At the same time, humanity’s Ecological Footprint—the demand people place upon the natural world—has increased to the point where the Earth is unable to keep up in the struggle to regenerate.
    - World Wide Fund for Nature, October 24, 2006

    The world environmental situation is likely to be further aggravated by the increasingly rapid, large scale global extinction of species. It occurred in the 20th century at a rate that was a thousand times higher than the average rate during the preceding 65 million years. This is likely to destabilize various ecosystems including agricultural systems.
    - Jaan Suurkula, Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology, February 6, 2004

    If current estimates of amphibian species in imminent danger of extinction are included in these calculations, then the current amphibian extinction rate may range from 25,039–45,474 times the background extinction rate for amphibians. It is difficult to explain this unprecedented and accelerating rate of extinction as a natural phenomenon.
    - Malcom MacCallum, Journal of Herpetology, July 17, 2007

    Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.
    - Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 70-71

Rob Zelt - Lighting Up the Web

  • TRINUG December Event
    4:03pm | Nov 29, 2011

    In an ongoing tradition, the Triangle .Net Users Group will be hosting a special December main meeting featuring a number of “Lightning Talks” by local presenters and a pot luck dinner. It’s a great way to get a full dose of technical info while enjoying a fun and festive gathering with your peers in the local .Net community.

    sign up to give a talk ...

    sign up for a dinner item...

    Please help spread the word! I look forward to seeing you there!

    NOTE : Meeting is Wednesday December 14, 2011.

  • Getting Back to Blogging
    2:14pm | Nov 14, 2011

    I’ve been blogging for quite a while now, and I’ve been amazed how my posting here have introduced me to many great people, helped others, and resulting in some really interesting opportunities for me. Over the last year and a bit, with the rapid flow of information through twitter and other online resources I’ve slipped out of the habit of frequent blog posts that I’ve previously done and enjoyed.

    Starting today I plan to change that.

    Now don’t worry, I’m not going to try and make up for lost time with a landslide of new posts today, but I do plan to return to a more consistent routine of posts. If you’re still reading this, thanks for sticking around.

  • RDU Code Camp – Saturday November 5, 2011
    3:41pm | Oct 29, 2011

    One week from today, on Saturday November 5th a number of North Carolina software developers will be spending the day at camp… Code Camp. If you’ve never attending a Code Camp, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to learn, network, and be both inspired and motivated to expand your skills. A number of speakers from near and far will be presenting on a variety of topics. To top it off, this event is free thanks to the support of a number of generous organizations.

    For more information and to register visit http://codecamp.org.

  • Build Windows–Now We Know
    10:18pm | Sep 13, 2011

    image

    After weeks of waiting, enduring silence and rumors, developers finally got their first public look at Windows 8 at Microsoft’s BUILD conference. People here at the conference were pretty excited about what they saw, and I can imagine many, many more watching remotely were also excited, or even relieved to see the details. Having talked to a number of people about their expectations a lot of people were very concerned to learn about the future of the technologies they have invested in both personally learning and financially building into projects. 

    For people who were worried, maybe the biggest news for them is that if your application runs under Windows 7 it will continue to run under Windows 8. That being said, we can not expect innovation without change at some point along the way. Windows 8 introduces “Metro style Apps”, a new multi-language, multi-view technology. By multi-language it means that native languages such as C and C++, managed languages like C# and VB.Net, but also JavaScript and have equal access to the Windows (WinRT) APIs to interact with windows. In reference to the views, it allows the use of HTML/CSS with JavaScript and XAML with both C# and C++ applications. The “Metro Style” applications are part of an “immersive”, “touch first”, “no compromise” user experience that spans all aspects of Windows 8.

     

    image
    [slide borrowed from \\Build\  keynote

    As you can see in the above diagram, the new “Metro Style” apps run along side the traditional “Desktop Apps”. Again, this means that the app you are working on today will continue to work on Windows 8. In many ways, today marks the begging of a new era in Windows application development. Well that may sound sound a bit outlandish, it’s true. This no application model not only allows a new model for application interactions, it promotes it with a variety of services to let apps communicate with each other and with other devices through the cloud.

    Bottom line, Windows 8 is going to be a game changer that creates many exciting opportunities.

  • Have You Been to the MSDN Site Lately?
    1:59pm | Jun 12, 2011

    Have you been to the MSDN site lately? I ask because I know that personally when I need to lookup something information related to my development efforts I’ll just search for it, often getting a mix of hits, instead of heading right the “the source” for much of this info. Admittedly, in the past some information had been hard to find on site, but if you haven’t checked it our recently, the MSDN website has undergone some changes.

    image

    A quick glance at the site shows a much cleaner looking design, with what seems to be much better organized information. For a fun comparison, here’s what the site looked like a few years ago.

    image

    Below the main menu, the site is dividing into three “portals” separating content by Platforms, Tasks, and News.

    image

    The Platforms page provides some overview information and easy access to dive further into Desktop, Web, Cloud, and Phone development areas.

    image

    For other areas, a quick click on the “All Developer Centers and Hubs” link takes you to a nice site map for all of the major areas. As you continue to drill into topic areas, the trend of better organized information continues, pulling together a variety of documents, videos, links to articles, and other great sources of information.

ScienceBlogs

  • Calling it like it is [Class M]
    11:39am | Feb 4, 2012

    Two examples of why blogs are better than mainstream news coverage, when it comes to confronting reality and doing something about it, one from the climate wars, one from the front lines of women's health.

    First, Andy Revkin, a former New York Times journalist who still blogs there. He calls out a coal-industry-backed attempt to silence one of the world's leading climatologists as the "Shameful Attack on Free Speech" that it is. By launching a Facebook campaign to convince Pennsylvania State University to cancel a scheduled talk by Michael Mann, the coal interests have indeed shamed themselves.

    Andy adds:

    Antidemocratic, hateful, and coal-backed smear campaign against a scientist I've sometimes disagreed with but who has every right to state his case at Penn State or anywhere else.

    A few hours after Andy's post, the Fb page disappeared. Penn State is sticking to its guns, too. Score one for the good guys.

    Read the rest of this post... |

    Read the comments on this post...

    Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club


  • Tea Party shenanigans [Class M]
    11:25am | Feb 4, 2012

    As if you needed another reason to lament the state of American politics:

    Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities. (New York Times, Feb 3, 2012)

    The story ends on what would be a humorous note:

    "The Tea Party people say they want nonpolluted air and clean water and everything we promote and support, but they also say it's a communist movement," said Charlotte Moore, a supervisor who voted yes. "I really don't understand what they want."

    Read the comments on this post...

    Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club


  • Saturn's Super Storm Staggers Skywatchers! [Sta...
    2:40am | Feb 4, 2012

    "More days to come / New places to go
    I've got to leave / It's time for a show
    Here I am / Rock you like a hurricane!" -The Scorpions
    It isn't just Earth, of course, where these great cyclonic storms occur, whipping across the planet and wreaking havoc as they rage above the surface. Most famous, perhaps, is Jupiter, whose great red spot has existed for as long as we've been able to see at the necessary resolution.

    But one doesn't often think of Saturn when it comes to devastating storms.

    saturn-earth2.jpeg

    (Image credit: Earth-based telescope, retrieved from SolarSystemQuick.com.)

    Saturn, quite famously, is a great gas giant planet, second only in size to Jupiter in our Solar System, and renowned for its spectacular rings. And although Saturn's rings are its most obvious feature, the clearly defined, featureless bands along its different latitudes also stand out.

    Unless, that is, you've taken a close look in the last year or so.

    s20110119-18h32UT-TBa.jpg

    (Image credit: Trevor Barry, Broken Hill, Australia.)

    That is not a featureless band up there in Saturn's Northern Hemisphere!

    Quite to the contrary, this is a virtually planet-wide storm plume, whose core is a 3,000-mile-wide thunderstorm, kicking up beacons of warm air and leaving behind ammonia ice crystals, which we can tell from Cassini's observations in the infrared.

    549957main_pia14119-43_full.jpeg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona.)

    Cassini, the famed Saturn spacecraft that's been orbiting our ringed neighbor for nearly a decade, first spotted this storm in the earliest stages of its infancy, all the way back in early December, 2010. I've highlighted it, below, visible right at Saturn's terminator.

    605067main_pia14902-full_full.jpg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

    Unlike storms on Earth, which typically last for days or -- in particularly devastating cases -- a few weeks, this storm on Saturn has set a new record.

    Lasting for more than 200 days, this Saturnian tempest rages all the way into August of last year, with the storm's head lasting intact at least into May. This made it the longest-lasting storm of this kind ever seen on Saturn; the first one since 1990 and the longest one since the first one was ever observed, all the way back in 1876!

    605889main_pia14905-full_full.jpeg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute; click for full-size.)

    As you can see, it was so powerful that, from February to April, the storm actually lapped itself, with the head of the storm clearly visible in those images.

    What you might not realize is that Cassini was also able to clearly identify the tail of the storm, by looking in the infrared! Below, in false-color, the red-orange methane clouds are topped by a high blue haze signifying the main end of the tail. (The rings also appear in blue as a thin line, as there is no methane there at all!)

    606716main_pia12829-43_full.jpeg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

    Although this is all that NASA released, Cassini is a bit of a special mission. You see, they have a publicly accessible imaging diary over at Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS).

    Want to see how the storm changed from one (Saturnian) day to the next? Taken 11 hours apart, from February 23rd, 2011 to February 24th, you can really see that -- at a scale of 64 miles (104 km) per pixel in the below image -- this giant hurricane is migrating across the face of Saturn at around 100 km/hr!

    daily_difference.jpeg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

    And finally, what can Cassini do, at its highest resolution in (nearly) true color, looking at the storm as it traverses its own wake across the planet? Click on the image for full-resolution, but even at its reduced screen resolution... well, see for yourself!

    rotated_storm.jpg

    (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

    You can follow the entire saga of the Saturn Storm Chronicles' report on last year's record-breaking display over at CICLOPS, but what an amazing view from Cassini!

    Read the comments on this post...

    Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club


  • Making excuses [Pharyngula]
    5:05pm | Feb 3, 2012

    The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

    Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

    In particular, the paper "Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105" was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled "The Origin of Life" in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue "Origin of Life - Feature Papers" for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication. As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary "origin of life" topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis's long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author's and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

    Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis's paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

    The "interdisciplinary" excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis's paper, and Abel's paper as well, were "off" — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there's something to them? You'd have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

    Also, you don't need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I'm reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky's cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

    The fact that they're having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they're publishing is also ominous. Shouldn't the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn't it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It's a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

    Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life "reject many submissions". I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis's and Abel's.

    (Also on FtB)

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    Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club


  • PopSci Returns as Valued Festival Media Partner...
    3:00pm | Feb 3, 2012

    Popular-science-Logo1.jpgPopular Science, one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more, is returning as a key Media Partner with the Festival!

    In doing so, PopSci joins a growing list of other top science media leaders who will be serving as Festival sponsors, including Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, MIT's Technology Review, Chemical & Engineering News, School Tube.com, ENGINEERING.com, EE Times and PBS Kids.

    PopSci has been a major source of science and technology news since its award-winning magazine Popular Science was founded back in 1872. Its online version, PopSci.com, was launched in 1999, and in 2008 this site was redesigned and upgraded to give viewers even more up-to-the-minute tech news and insightful commentary on new innovations, and even scientific angles on the hottest Hollywood movies and stories.

    Returning from its stint as a valued Media Partner in the 2010 Festival, Popular Science, like other key media sponsors in next year's event, will run advertisements pro bono via their respective media outlets which will play a key role in not only giving the Festival heightened visibility on a national and international scale, but also will help the event recruit for new satellite venues and participation in the Expo, contests and other activities.

    Published by the Bonnier Magazine Group (which also publishes Science Illustrated), Popular Science is long known for its commitment to journalistic excellence in reporting on the latest in innovation, while giving readers an insightful look into what the future of technology holds.
    Kid.jpg
    Says Gregg Hano, Senior Vice President of Bonnier Corporate Sales & Technology Group, "We invest in that vision with our media properties everyday, and supporting the USA Science & Engineering Festival is one more way for us to ensure that the next generation will have the skills, knowledge and interest to deliver on that bright future."

    We thank Popular Science and our other Media Partners for their valued participation!

    Read the comments on this post...

    Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club


The Abstract

  • Norovirus: What It Is, How We’re Fighting It
    5:34pm | Feb 3, 2012
    Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Lee-Ann Jaykus, a professor in NC State’s Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences, and lead investigator of a $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to study human noroviruses. If you have spent a day or
  • What’s A Genotype? What’s A Phenotype? And ...
    2:15pm | Jan 30, 2012
    Genetics research is interesting stuff, and news stories about exciting new findings seem to crop up almost daily. But many people simply don’t have the vocabulary to understand what’s going on. “What is a genotype anyway?” you might ask. “What’s a phenotype? And why should I care?” Good questions! Let’s talk about this a little
  • A Guided Tour Of The Bone Lab – Or, Forensic ...
    7:49pm | Jan 24, 2012
    Last week, NC State hosted the ScienceOnline2012 conference, bringing together a wide variety of people with an interest in communicating about science. During the conference, I had the opportunity to lead a small group of attendees on a tour of the forensic anthropology labs at NC State. The folks on the tour really enjoyed it,
  • Anti-bacterial Nukes
    3:32pm | Jan 18, 2012
    Imagine an anti-bacterial nuclear warhead – a compound so volatile that bacteria cannot develop resistance to it, because once it is deployed, there aren’t any bacteria left to develop resistance. Now imagine that the compound can be activated by light, which gives doctors and scientists the ability to pinpoint specific areas for detonation and to
  • The Big (Moving) Picture
    3:53pm | Jan 13, 2012
    Why do some science stories fire the public’s imagination, while others go unnoticed? We welcome your input on this question because, frankly, we are often surprised when one piece of research takes off and another goes nowhere. However, we have seen one common thread among some of our biggest science stories: video. With that in

The Real Paul Jones

  • On the 6th Month of #noemail 12 People Sent to ...
    7:13pm | Dec 26, 2011
    November was my 6th month of #noemail and people have learned well how to reach me by means other than email. I think my “vacation” message offering the many alternatives to email helped a lot on this front. As you will see from my deep analysis of the 12 Gmail Priority Messages that I received, [...]
  • Steve Gillmor Remembers email in a time of #noe...
    9:23pm | Dec 19, 2011
    Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang writes in TechCrunch about “Remembering Email” which is much like remembering the magic of Top 40 Radio or maybe the first clear FM stations. Steve notes that notifications have taken over his attention and ours, but even more the attention of our kids. Readers of this blog won’t be surprised by [...]
  • Thierry Breton’s got some ’splainin’ to d...
    3:35pm | Dec 7, 2011
    Atos SA CEO Thierry Breton really opened the #noemail discussion to a wider audience with his announcement that Atos, one of the world’s largest technology companies, would put an end to internal email within 18 months. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Press Release is that it is dated February 7, 2011 and is [...]
  • Room For Debate: Should Workplaces Curtail E-Ma...
    4:34am | Dec 7, 2011
    Much of the media is jazzed about Thierry Breton’s decision to end corporate email within Atos SA in the next 18 months. Can he do it? Is he sane? What will come of it if it does work? And hey, we did that already ourselves. In this last camp are: Klick in INC’s “The Company That [...]
  • LOLing and Leaving #noemail
    5:00pm | Nov 29, 2011
    While some like Observer (UK) writer John Naughton are LOLing over Mark Zuckerberg’s observation that email is dead,” others, like Atos SA (Europe’s Largest IT Company) CEO Theirry Breton are kicking email out of their companies. Breton’s pronouncements got ink (err electrons too) in Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph (UK) yesterday before getting the hyperactive [...]

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