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A Blog Around the Clock
- New URL/feed for A Blog Around The Clock9:17pm | 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 far12:40pm | 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 Quotes8:54am | 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... - Clock Quotes8:59am | Jul 18, 2010
ChemSpider
- An Article in Bio-IT World on Spidey Sense:Open...12:16pm | Jul 30, 2010A few weeks ago we won an award from Bio-IT World for Community Service. Allison Proffitt from Bio-IT world interviewed me recently in connection with the award and some of the history behind ChemSpider and wrote it up for the magazine. The resulting article is also available online here. addthis_url = [...]
- Feedback Requested on New Website Design1:05am | Jul 21, 2010We are in the process of a website redesign with the intention to deliver a new look and feel in time for the ACS meeting. We have some draft pages available online and we would like YOUR feedback please! We have five drafts of the Home page that we would like your comments on. Let us [...]
- ChemSpider shortlisted…12:13pm | Jul 19, 2010We’re very proud that ChemSpider is one of the shortlisted finalists for the ALPSP 2010 Publishing Innovation award – the other finalists are Mastervision from DataSalon, Semantic Biochemical Journal from Portland Press, and UniPHY from the American Institute of Physics. The winners will be announced on 9 September at the ALPSP International [...]
- Meet up with ChemSpider at the Fall ACS Meeting...12:42pm | Jul 16, 2010It is now a year since the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) acquired ChemSpider and much has happened in what is really quite a short space of time. ChemSpider has added more compounds and data sources, significant compound collections, there are now links to RSC Publishing and PubMed which are effectively making these resources structure-searchable, we have [...]
- MolPort announces enhanced compound acquisition...12:37pm | Jul 15, 201015th July 2010. Today MolPort announces that a connection has been established between its compound procurement module and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ChemSpider, the structure-centric community for chemists. A link has been created from ChemSpider to MolPort so that ChemSpider users can readily order rare chemicals for their research identified [...]
De Rerum Natura
- Odd Hack10:34pm | Jul 19, 2010This machine got partially hacked over the weekend. From what I can tell, Ziproxy was compromised and used to submit spam email through my system. Because my mail sever accepts local email, it was going out. It looks like only...
- Dawg 28:52pm | Apr 21, 2010Dawg created its first protein sequences today. Woot!...
- Bama Wins 2009 Calix Cari10:02pm | Jan 20, 2010The announcement is a bit late, but after beating Texas, Bama has won the 2009 Calix Cari. RankTeamRecordQuality 5.3147: 40-14 Florida Int'l5.1754: 53-7 North Texas8.8153: 35-7 Arkansas7.4998: 38-20 Kentucky8.6283: 22-3 Mississippi7.9232: 20-6 South Carolina7.3722: 12-10 Tennessee8.4587: 24-15 LSU7.9865: 31-3 Mississippi...
- Network Issues11:53pm | Jan 1, 2010We’ve been having network issues for the last week. (The network setup in general is not reliable.) Nothing is wrong with what I have control over, but I’m kind of stuck with the connection that I’ve been given. My apologies...
- Calix Cari 2009 Week 1410:09pm | Dec 9, 2009With the conference championship games complete my Calix Cari rankings once again agree with the pollsters: its Texas versus Alabama for the title. Surprisingly, despite Tebow crying after visiting the wood-shed in Atlanta Florida still ranks #3, ahead of undefeated...
Duke Research
- BONOBO HANDSHAKE OUT NOW!2:19pm | Apr 25, 2010
Hey everyone - it's finally here! I'm just about to move the blog to Psychology Today. But to order your copy, see where I'm speaking, or just general bonobo news, visit www.bonobohandshake.com - There's still time!
- Primate Palooza tonight!12:08pm | Apr 14, 2010Tonight, at Duke University in NC we are celebrating primates, especially bonobos.
Because bonobos get ignored back front and sideways as demostrated by this family tree:
which happens ALL the time (ironically this image was on the post "know your family tree" ) WHERE ARE BONOBOS???
So like the fat kid at school, to make up for all the times they are left out, forgotten, uninvited to the party, Claudine Andre will be coming to dedicate the evening to our long lost cousins.
If you don't come for bonobos, come for signed men's basketball memorabilia.
So if you're on Duke's campus, watch out for:
which is a lemur chasing a banana (we couldn't get a bonobo suit made in time). But come see for yourself.
- What it takes to be a hero6:07pm | Apr 13, 2010
- almost forgot!7:54am | Apr 12, 2010Brian said he spent hours with Lomela at the release site - and she's doing great!
i told him to get photos but he lost his camera (idiot) so you'll just have to take my word for it for now. will try and rummage up some photos soon...
Duke Research (blog)
- We've MOVED!5:03pm | May 19, 2010We'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, 2010Guest 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 Workshop9:14pm | May 12, 2010That 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 Business5:32am | Apr 16, 2010Do 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 Walls1:35pm | Apr 15, 2010Guest 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
Forth Go
- Minute of Zen: Gravel on Spider’s Thread1:15am | Jul 14, 2010I saw this piece of pea gravel magically spinning in the air behind my house [YouTube]. It was about a foot off the ground then. When I returned later after forgetting about it, my head bumped into the gravel piece. A spider on the roof must have been trying to pull in the thread. I bet [...]
- Science Online 201010:20pm | Jan 18, 2010The fourth Science Online conference just wrapped up, and it was as lively as ever. Unfortunately, my attendance was limited since I was coming down with a cold. I attended only a couple of sessions and tried to keep interactions to a minimum, which was hard to do at such an interactive conference with many [...]
- Stella at One2:21am | Dec 2, 2009Our new puppy, Stella, turned one year old this week-end. She’s a very light coated golden retriever, a cross between the American and British types in hopes of reducing inbred genetic faults. So far she’s been quite healthy and full of puppy energy. I’m sure any day now she’ll realize she’s grown up and settle [...]
- Chapel Hill Election Clustering Revised1:28am | Nov 18, 2009I’ve updated the cluster analysis based on comments received. Thanks to Ed Harrison, I have included data from the Durham County precincts. And since other commenters explained away the apparent under-voting in some precincts, I recalculated the percentages to be based on the number of people voting in that race instead of the total ballots [...]
- Chapel Hill Election Clustering2:22am | Nov 17, 2009Damon Seils provided some great maps of the precinct results from this month’s local elections. I played around with the data, and found the results of a two-cluster analysis to be interesting. The ballots don’t include party affiliation, but candidates fell into two clusters, anyway, and the precincts fit several different profiles in support of [...]
Julian Lombardi's Blog
- Julian Lombardi's Blog Has Moved2:20am | May 20, 2009I'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 Workspaces10:37pm | 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 Import11:23pm | 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
- A decade of blogging4:38am | Jul 29, 2010
Ten years ago this month, Frank the Beachcomber — my paternal grandfather, Francis C. Zuiker — was dying. He was 90 years old, and he had given the extended Zuiker family much to emulate and celebrate. His was a lifetime of hard work down at the Pullman Car Company, but also one of writing and storytelling, family camping trips and musical jamborees, and loving dedication to his spouse and children and grandchildren.
Grandpa meant the world to me, and I wanted to honor him publicly before he passed on.
I was just back from the South Pacific, where I’d spent my two Peace Corps years on an island without electricity and running water. I had the New Yorker sent to me for hammock reading, but by far the most important words that came in the mail were the Zuiker Chronicles letters that my grandfather wrote to me. He was still sharing tales of his earlier trips to the Outer Banks, and still angling for ‘trade goods’ such as sea shells and shark teeth that he could make into necklaces and earrings. Erin and I boxed up an armful of cone shells and black sand gathered from the beach a hundred yards from our house in Liro Village.
Back home in Ohio, inspired by Frank’s legacy of creativity and inspiration, I decided to create a virtual Zuiker Chronicles, a family newsletter for a new, digital age. To do so, I’d have to learn new skills (HTML programming and website management), write in a new way, and teach the rest of my family how to interact with Zuiker Chronicles Online. I knew Frank would be proud.
With the help of a colleague, I launched the site, at zuikerchronicles.com, in late July 2000. It had a few pictures, some essays about my time in Vanuatu, and an invitation to my aunts and uncles and cousins to contribute their own news. Within days, I was updating the site regularly — updating by hand, editing html files and uploading them to the server over a dial-up connection late into the night. I was blogging, but I didn’t know it.
At some point, my aunt showed Frank the website I’d created. He may not have comprehended the technology — he was just trying to breathe those last few months — but I’m confident he understood that his grandson had done something important to continue the legacy of a man who loved to write and report.
Frank died in September 2000, and with the site in place, there was a way for my family to honor the man. The tribute page to Frank that I put up is still online. (Later, I would edit and publish two books that Frank wrote, about his childhood and about my father’s Peace Corps service in the Dominican Republic.)
Blogger by any other name
Not long after, I encountered Blogger.com and quickly converted the site to that tool, which made it so much easier for me to write, post and publish updates to Zuiker Chronicles Online (by now I also had the site pointed to the domain zuiker.com). Ironically, my first post using Blogger starts with this:
Thanksgiving Day. I’m in my pajamas listening to National Public Radio, working on the computer.
Truth is, I would spend countless nights at the computer, writing on my blog, promising Erin I’d be done in just 15 more minutes, but crawling into bed well into the morning. I would use many blogging tools — Greymatter, MovableType, pMachine, Textpattern, Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, Tumblr — and try any beta that might help me build the online Zuiker community.
In j-school in 2002, I encountered the incomparable and real Paul Jones and eagerly took his class, Making & Living in Online Communities. Justin Watt and Jackson Fox were also in that class, and they helped me form the Tar Heel Bloggers group that began to meet regularly at UNC. (Justin was just back in town this weekend, and we held a brunch for him and Stephanie; they’ll be embarking on a container ship sojourn soon!)
Building community
The report I did for that class was about my Zuiker Chonicles Online efforts and blogging adventures, and the title, Blog Together, would eventually become the abiding concept and umbrella organization (replacing Tar Heel Bloggers) under which I would collaborate with many local and far-flung friends for online community building and offline events. My essay for the News & Observer, When blogging, face the conversation, set out the BlogTogether philosophy: online community building coupled with face-to-face events will strengthen and enrich our conversations everywhere.
Through BlogTogether, we have organized events small and large, from backyard barbecues to Blogging101 tutorial sessions to countless talks before affinity groups. Our major efforts started with the Triangle Bloggers Conference in 2005 — blogging pioneer Dave Winer drove in, and over brunch the next day urged me to ‘bootstrap the community’. Bora Zivkovic sat behind Dave at the conference, and he’s since become my close friend and collaborator on the annual science blogging conferences (we call them ScienceOnline now).
Brian Russell and Ruby Sinreich and Wayne Sutton and Abel Pharmboy are also at the heart of BlogTogether. There are so many others, for the Triangle is awash in talented, tireless individuals eager to participate in the conversation. They are a prime reason I was able to convince my wife, Erin, that North Carolina should be our home for good (Erin finished law school recently, and we could have gone anywhere).
I’m proud of what N&O editor Dan Barkin wrote about me in his article about the second science blogging conference
The Web has evolved into a tribal Internet of passionate bloggers like Zuiker, and he has become a sort-of local brand. He’s a quiet visionary. He’s a low-key doer. He’s a let’s-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It’s the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a significant role in determining how far Web 2.0 goes from being a sociable network to a social force.
Among the many ideas I’ve chased through the years, to varying levels of success: food blogging (highlighted by a September 2007 event with Michael Ruhlman — he called me ‘sweet’), medicaljournalism.info, storyblogging.org and narrativesofhiv.org, and the nascent The Long Table.
mistersugar
In December 2004, I separated my personal blog, The Coconut Wireless, from the family-focused Zuiker Chronicles Online and launched mistersugar.com.
If you’ve followed me through the years, you know I’ve had fun building the mistersugar brand and celebrating its roots in my service to the country of Vanuatu. Connecting my present to my past has been a key theme to my blogging — it’s my form of story blogging, and is a manifestation of the Zuiker Chronicles of Frank the Beachcomber and the weekly typewriter reports of my other grandfather, Louis Sisco. (From my N&O essay linked above: “I became a writer because they wrote. And then, with the Web, I became a blogger.”
Read my About page to learn more about the blog name and the pig icon.
I have a busy and full life away from the computer, with an amazing wife and darling children, intense career and important friendships, family gatherings and farmer markets, and stacks and stacks of magazines and books. My entries have slowed considerably over the last few years, but I’m proud that The Coconut Wireless still has a strong signal (and that Zuiker Chronicles Online is still standing). I’m proud to consider myself a blogger, and amazed at where blogging has taken me.
The last six months have been filled with introspection — I’m midstream, don’t you know — and, as you no doubt surmised, this look back on a decade blogging adds to my self-reflection.
At my core, I’m grateful to my family, my friends, my community and my country for giving me so much to experience. In 10 years of blogging, I’ve gotten to express my wonderment and joy at being so lucky.
- Oliver's baptism2:18am | Jul 20, 2010
Little Oliver (or the Big O) was baptized along with his cousin Virginia Grace on Saturday, July 10 in a Solon, Ohio backyard. (There was a bit of confusion about Erin’s name at first, but Rev. Tom got it right a bit later.)
[Video removed for privacy reasons.]
- Alone for the weekend, I keep busy3:26am | Jul 19, 2010
Aside from the fact that Erin’s still in Cleveland for a few more days, this weekend was quite enjoyable, and I’m feeling great.
I had a great massage Friday after work, where I’m enjoying my new role and excited about the big challenges and opportunities already piling up.
Saturday morning I went to the Durham Farmers Market, where I wandered among the crowd and thanked my lucky stars that I live here, now. I bought a bucketful of blackberries, which I used later in the day to make a batch of blackberry jam. I ran a couple of miles on the treadmill at the gym, and bought a new pair of Nike Air Pegasus running shoes.
Saturday evening, I drove with two friends to Raleigh. These friends happened to know a musician named John Mayer, who was performing that night at the Time Warner Cable Pavilion at Walnut Creek. We got to go backstage to chat with Mayer before he did his rockin’ rock star thing. (Thanks G & J for bringing me along!)
Today, I mowed the lawn, scrubbed the shower (mildew be gone!), washed the dishes and folded laundry. Then, a rapid series of meetings, first with a neighbor to plan our new community directory, then with Bora and Christopher to plan ScienceInTheTriangle.org and ScienceOnline2011, and then to dinner with foodie Dean McCord, his children and friend Brooks Hamaker, a brewer extraordinaire. (Dean also introduced me to Phoebe Lawless of Scratch bakery.)
All in all, a fun few days.
- Supa ukulele7:04pm | Jun 13, 2010
The season finale of Glee last week featured a rendition of Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World reminiscent — but nowhere near the beauty — of the recording by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.
Everytime I hear that song by Iz, I recall the day I met him in the Ala Moana Tower Records in Honolulu in 1993. I think I happened to be walking past the store that day but noticed a sign about his visiting to promote his new record, Facing Future. I walked in, bought a CD and asked him sign it to my family.Iz was a giant both physically and musically, and with his tiny ukulele and angelic voice, he was a Hawaiian superman. Meeting him was a highlight of my time in Hawaii.
Another highlight of my time in Hawaii was when I went to the Kona Coast of the Big Island to interview David Gomes, a master craftsman of ukulele and guitar. (Looking for the article I wrote about him; will post later.)
There’s a new documentary about the ukulele. Listen to this NPR story.
- Midstream and taking a new step4:11am | Jun 13, 2010
The last months, with a birthday milestone and the birth of baby Oliver, have been a fertile time of self-reflection (explained in this post from February). I’ve looked back on my first 40 years with satisfaction and gratitude, and turned my middle-aged eyes to see what stepping stones might be arranged before me for the next 40 (read this post to understand my ‘crossing the stream’ guide to life).
No mid-life crisis for me, thank you, very much. Still, mid-life is also mid-career.
On the heels of ScienceOnline2010, I had jotted down a description of an ideal job, encompassing social media and online community building and the license to roam a large institution looking for opportunities to teach, train, converse and capture stories. (David Thomas at SAS is an example for all of us with this dream.)
I was starting to get somewhere with my search for such an opportunity — more and more companies and communities and institutions will be creating such positions, I’m sure — when an opportunity of a different sort pulled me in.
Later this month, I will become director of communications for the Department of Medicine at the Duke University Medical Center, working with the new chair of the department, Mary Klotman, M.D. I’m thrilled to be joining her team.
This new job keeps me at Duke (I’ve been working for the Duke University Health System since 2007, as manager of internal communications) and is an opportunity to continue using my medical journalism masters degree and various communications experiences to tell the story of the Department of Medicine, which is the largest of the departments that make up the Duke School of Medicine.
With more than 1,000 physicians, faculty, researchers and staff treating patients, training residents and investigating diseases and new treatments, the Department of Medicine is going to be a perfect mid-river island for me to explore, map and mine. I’m sure I’ll use social media tools and strategies along the way.
I’m fortunate to have had a full and wide-ranging life so far, and am grateful to all the family, friends and mentors who have made it so memorable. Thanks for sharing this journey with me — next month, I’ll celebrate 10 years of blogging. Keep reading, please, as I share my experiences and observations, from Duke and beyond.
Nicholas Insider
- The Nicholas School Goes to Washington, Stays H...12:00am | Jan 1, 1970I do not have any official employment numbers in my hand, but many/several Nich (Nic, Nick, or Nich? Your call) Schoolers have started to land jobs and scatter to the wind.
- Relax your Body12:00am | Jan 1, 1970My daughter has the right idea.
- Getting a Job in 201012:00am | Jan 1, 1970I have applied for 100 jobs since November 1st, 2009. I have since had about 10 interviews. I have gotten 1 job offer. But hey! Don’t let these numbers depress you; there is a silver lining.
- Who said I get the summer off?12:00am | Jan 1, 1970I thought I would have the summer off. Hah!
- Post-Graduation Haze12:00am | Jan 1, 1970After graduating, celebrating, traveling, packing, moving, interviewing, and starting a summer job in Durham, I have returned to world of the stress-free weekends and am carefully considering the next step.
Primate Diaries
- The Primate Diaries Has Moved to Science Blogs1:37am | Jul 2, 2009My 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 Selection11:58pm | Apr 3, 2009Unicolonial 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
It 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 Extinctions5:15pm | 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, 2006The 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, 2004If 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, 2007Junk-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 - Darwin's Controversy of the Corals4:08pm | Mar 29, 2009
The Reef Tank is currently hosting my new post that tells the story of one of the largest controversies in the history of science. It involves Charles Darwin, a son defending his father's honor and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Intrigued? Go over and check it out, as well as some great posts by other fellow science bloggers. Here is a quick taste:
It took the threat of nuclear annihilation between the two greatest powers of the 20th century to solve one of the most profound scientific controversies of the 1800s. In 1952 Dr. Harry Ladd, a researcher for the US Geological Survey, convinced the US War Department to drill holes deep into the Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls just prior to their obliteration by hydrogen bombs. The reason for the drilling had little to do with the nuclear tests as part of Operation Crossroads, but was simply to conduct an experiment based on the hypothesis of coral reef formation first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1837.
Read the rest here.
Rob Zelt - Lighting Up the Web
- Azure Boot Camp – Raleigh / Durham Edition11:57am | Jun 18, 2010
If you haven’t already registered, be sure to check out the upcoming Windows Azure Boot Camp that’s taking place Wednesday June 23rd in Durham, NC. This free training event is a great opportunity to get your feet wet with Windows Azure. Microsoft DE Brian Hitney and Jim Duffy from TakeNote Technologies will be presenting the content.
This is a hands on workshop, so show up laptop in hand and ready to learn. More information and registration information is available. Once again, it’s a free event but you must register to attend.
- Raleigh OData Workshop with Chris Woodruff on J...11:57am | Apr 26, 2010
Save the date! Please plan to join us on Wednesday, June 2, at 8:30 AM at the Jane S. McKimmon Conference & Training Center for an OData workshop.
Free registration: http://odataworkshop.eventbrite.com/
Recommended Audiences: Solution Architects, Software Developers, Developers, Architects
Abstract
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol for sharing data. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in a way that is far more powerful than currently possible, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem increases its overall value.
OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web). This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.
OData is released under the Open Specification Promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.
In this talk Chris will provide an in depth knowledge to this protocol, how to consume a OData service and finally how to implement an OData service on Windows using the WCF Data Services product.
Agenda
· Introductions (5 minutes)
· Overview of OData (10 minutes)
· The OData Protocol (1 hour)
· 15 minute break
· Producing OData Feeds (1 hour)
· Consuming OData Feeds (1 hour)Bio
Chris Woodruff (or Woody as he is commonly known as) has a degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University’s College of Engineering. Woody has been developing and architecting software solutions for almost 15 years and has worked in many different platforms and tools. He is a community leader, helping such events as Day of .NET Ann Arbor, West Michigan Day of .NET and CodeMash. He was also instrumental in bringing the popular Give Camp event to Western Michigan where technology professionals lend their time and development expertise to assist local non-profits. As a speaker and podcaster, Woody has spoken and discussed a variety of topics, including database design and open source. He is a Microsoft MVP in Data Platform Development. Woody works at RCM Technologies in Grand Rapids, MI as a Principal Consultant.
Woody is the co-host of the popular podcast “Deep Fried Bytes” and blogs at www.chriswoodruff.com. He is the President of the West Michigan .NET User Group and also is a co-founder of the software architecture online portal nPlus1.org.
Woody has worked in many arenas throughout the years, including healthcare, manufacturing, publishing, promotion execution and the automotive industry. He has experience with starting and running new ventures, including past work with technology startups. Woody continues to develop his expertise by learning & developing new technologies to better meet the needs of his clients, while devoting his free time to improving the development community at large, and giving back to the community in which he lives.
- Silverlight 4 Training8:29pm | Apr 21, 2010
On the heels of the release of Silverlight 4, Adam Kinney and John Papa have put together an online Silverlight 4 training course over on Channel 9. Units in the course cover the new features in SL4 as well focusing in on how many of the new features enable Silvelright base line of business (LOB) applications. They dive into WCF Ria Services, User Registration and Authentication, Drop Target, Webcam, Clipboard, Printing, and even MEF. Download the Silverlight 4 Training kit FOR FFREE and get up to speed quickly and all the new goodness.
- DotNetRocks is coming to town May 6th12:44am | Apr 21, 2010
Now better watch out,
you better code right.
You better test first
and refactor that right!
Carl and Richard are coming to town!
The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip is headed back to RTP for a special LIVE event Thursday May6th and will be joined by a special surprise guest. If you’re still kicking yourself for missing them last time, sign up before it’s too late to see them again this time!
Where are they now?
What's this all about? (Their text)
Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to your town again to show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0!
And to make the night even more fun, we’re going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series.
Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs.
So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening – and find out what’s new and cool in Visual Studio 2010!
Register to attend! (The event is FREE, but you must register to attend!)
Technorati Tags: #dnr_roadtrip - Silverlight 4 Arrives Today! Go, download, crea...10:38pm | Apr 15, 2010
Today on the Official Microsoft Silverlight site http://www.silverlight.net is the announcement we have all been waiting for:
It’s been just three short years since the first release of Silverlight, and truly amazing to see where things are at. I’ve been extremely privileged to have had opportunities to work with the product team along the way through a number of releases now, and it’s been a remarkable experience. The teams involved represent an amazing group of talented individuals with an unbelievable passion for their work, and it shows. My hat goes off to each an every one of them for being a part of reaching such a major milestone in a very short period of time. Well done my friends, well done!
Silverlight 4 is a major release with many new features including:
Local Fonts, Printing, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), Webcam and Microphone support, Audio/Video Output protection, Multitask Networking, Offline DRM, Trusted Applications, IDistpatch COM interop, Group policy object support, Full keyboard in out-of-browser for trusted applications, Cross-domain network access for trusted applications, Custom window Chrome, Out of browser window settings (Position, size, etc), Web Browser Control and Web Browser Brush, Notification Toast, and Right-to-Left / BiDi text.
In addition, Silverlight’s support for major browsers included Firefox, Safari, IE has been increased to include Google Chrome on both the Mac and Windows.
As you download the RTW (Release To Web) of the client, you may notice that some of the tools downloads are still RC. Fear not, the runtime is the finished SL4, but because the tools needed the runtime to complete before the could do a final wrap there’s a slight lag. Rather than wait to release everything, these pretty darn close to final tools (My words, not theirs) have been made available at the same time as the completed runtime so we can all get our SL 4 apps built for RTW and out on the web, with the final versions of the tools expected in the near future as a “minor update”. (Tim Heuer has more details in the this post Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement )
The Silverlight Toolkit has also been updated with an April 2010 release which has a number of enhancements including new Charting Controls, a new Context Menu control, new Themes, a new PanelDragDropTarget, as well as other improvements. For more information check out the Silverlight Toolkit April 2010 changes
Now go my friends and code!
Technorati Tags: Silverlight 4
ScienceBlogs
- "Global Warming" turns 35 [A Few Things Ill Con...3:57am | Jul 31, 2010
This is not a reference to the recent three decades of rapidly increasing global temperatures, rather it is a reference to an aniversary of the first appearance of the term "global warming" in the peer reviewed literature. The paper was by Wally Broeker and titled "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?"
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- Motion Sickness [Oscillator]10:16pm | Jul 30, 2010
I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf grottos), that one time scuba diving in Belize (after I had made it to the surface, thankfully), and in lobby trashcans of various finally stationary destinations (the video is of me, my sister, and my fiancé inadvisedly spinning around while at an archeological site in Greece earlier this summer, where I was lucky enough to avoid any emesis). While I am particularly susceptible to motion sickness, almost everyone with inner ear function will experience it at some point given the right tilting, oscillating, and generally vestibularly-disturbing circumstances.
What is going on in our guts and brains when we're in a moving vehicle that makes us throw up? Why can't we just deal with motion better? As it negatively affects so many, this nauseating (did you know: the word nausea itself comes from the Greek word for boat!) inconvenience associated with technologically-assisted travel by sea, land, air, or IMAX screens has been the focus of intense and sometimes wacky research for more than 100 years. Although a great deal of mechanistic evidence for how motion sickness happens has been described, the theories of why it happens are still controversial and fascinating.
Experiences with motion sickness have been described since at least the time of Hippocrates, and until the late 1800's, the causes of motion sickness were attributed to "blood and guts theories", the symptoms thought to be the result of decreased cerebral blood flow or disturbance of digestive flow caused by the shaking of the viscera. When Victorian physicians started realizing that people who didn't have inner ear function never got motion sickness, the theories of what causes motion sickness completely changed. Instead of focusing on the humours, physicians thought that motion sickness was caused by vestibular overstimulation--when our balance-sensing systems are overloaded by rolling motion, our body freaks out and starts barfing.The vestibular system of the inner ear is fascinatingly complex, made out of a series of tubes full of fluid sloshing around inside your head, activating nerves that tell your brain where you are and where you're going as the fluid tips and turns. Connections between the vestibular system and our muscles and eyes help to keep us standing upright and to make sure that we can see stable images even as we move our heads. While the Victorian observations made it very clear that the vestibular system is involved in causing motion sickness, it eventually was realized that overstimulation alone wasn't enough to explain the phenomenon. Overstimulating your vestibular system while jumping or dancing will almost never cause motion sickness, and drivers or pilots rarely experience motion sickness even while their passengers are vomiting, so control of your own motion is somehow important too, affecting how the signals of motion are being interpreted by your brain. Moreover, as basically anyone who's seen Cloverfield can attest, it's possible to feel motion sickness without moving at all, simply watching simulations of motion in movies or video games is enough to make many people sick.
Motion sickness is now understood as not just something that happens when your inner ear is overwhelmed, but arises when your brain is confused about what your eyes are seeing and what your vestibular system is feeling. When your body is moving but you can't see or control why you're moving, or when you see motion that doesn't correspond to what your body is feeling at the movies, the mismatch of the neural signals activates the vomiting center of the brain. Many of these neural pathways and brain structures were identified through a series of horrific experiments on dogs in the 1940's and 1950's involving destroying different parts of the brain and seeing whether the mutilated dog would throw up after being spun around on a swing. In the 1980's and 90's slightly more humane experiments on human undergraduates standing and vomiting on wobbling platforms added more data on the simply anatomical picture from the dog studies, providing mathematical models of the neural pathways involved in motion sickness, details on the types of motion that make it better or worst (0.2 Hz is the optimal barf frequency), how strobe lights or keeping absolutely still while in a moving vehicle can make symptoms better (some people think that this is why antihistamines like dramamine can help with symptoms of motion sickness), how ginger can make you feel less nauseous, and even connections between migraine and motion sickness susceptibility.
These studies offer suggestions for dealing with motion sickness through engineering or pharmaceutical interventions, but none really address why we suffer from motion sickness. Is there a reason that our brains can't process these contradictory eye/ear signals? Does motion sickness somehow actually make us stronger, or at least better able to survive to the next generation; is there a positive evolutionary selection for feeling sick? The fact that many mammals, like those poor postwar experimental dogs, and even fish being transported on trucks experience motion sickness points to a kind of evolutionary stability that many scientists have seen as evidence that there has to be an evolutionary explanation for motion sickness. Starting in the 1970's and continuing today, several evolutionary theories seeking to explain why we suffer from motion sickness have been published and debated, offering several scenarios for how such neural pathways could be selected for.
What kind of selective pressure would be so strong as to keep tricking our brain into barfing in harmless situations? One interesting idea is the toxin theory--during the billions of years of animal evolution, the kinds of motion that cause motion sickness are pretty rare relative to other things that could cause mixed sensory signals getting to your brain, like, for example, hallucinogenic neurotoxins. When your eyes and your ears are saying different things, your brain doesn't realize that this is the result of external motion, but thinks that you're hallucinating and forces you to throw up to expel the offending toxin. If you actually are hallucinating, barfing seems like a great response, and a great way to keep on living to produce more offspring.
Contrasting hypotheses point out that this theory can't really explain the fact that babies and toddlers--who are at relatively high risk for ingesting and being killed by toxins--don't get motion sickness when being carried around. A much simpler and much more recently published theory is the negative reinforcement model, which posits that motion sickness, instead of being a protective mechanism against toxins, is like pain--an unpleasant response to something that is bad for us and causes us to avoid the triggering behavior in the future. According to this theory, motion sickness teaches us to avoid the out-of-control motion that could injure us or leave us more vulnerable to predation. Certainly, spinning around all the time can make you fall down and a much easier target for saber-toothed tigers. In my cushy tiger-free life, motion sickness has provided the negative reinforcement to avoid spinning amusement park rides and sailboats (although not quite enough to stop getting in cars or planes when the destination seems worth it).
These theories can perhaps help satisfy our feelings of being betrayed by our own bodies, and can point to other toxin-sensing or negative-reinforcement neural networks involved, perhaps expanding our how understanding, but I'm always a little skeptical of this type of evolutionary argument. Even though my fiancé comes from a seafaring family, I don't think my motion sickness susceptibility is going to necessarily hurt my chances of reproducing. Although soldiers and sailors do have much higher stakes for being incapacitated by motion sickness, motion sickness became a fixed trait in animals way before the existence of humvees or aircraft carriers. Does there really have to be a positive evolutionary selection for motion sickness in order for it to exist? What if motion sickness is a completely arbitrary consequence of how our brainstems evolved, as some evolutionary biologists are beginning to think is the case for courting displays and secondary sex characteristics (check out Carl Zimmer's awesome post about arbitrary sexual selection and evolution over at The Loom: "Darwin, Sex, and Dada")?
What if as our brain develops in early childhood and we become more coordinated, the pathways that turn out to activate motion sickness in the wrong contexts get laid down too? What if there's no negative selection against motion sickness, or no positive selection for the systems that could stop it? Imagine there is some very costly way for our brains to be able to deal with conflicting sensory input, to avoid motion sickness, but having evolved without boats and cars and airplanes we didn't have the selective pressure for such a mechanism to be worth the cost. Next time I'm feeling seasick, as I try desperately to look to the horizon, clutching my ginger pills, all of these contradictory just-so stories will swirl in my head (just like my vestibular fluid), making me if not comforted that there could be an evolutionary reason for my discomfort, at least distracted from the worst of the queasiness.
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- Does drinking beer increase your attractiveness...8:00pm | Jul 30, 2010The anopheles mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is the primary vector for human malaria. Mosquitoes in general, the A. gambiae included, find their prey by tracking body odor exuded from the breath and skin. Apparently, the composition of body odor determines A. gambiae's preference for one individual over another. It has been known for some time now that A. gambiae preferentially seek out and draw blood from pregnant women (Linsay et al 2000; Ansell et al 2002; Himeidan, Elbashir and Adam 2004), preferring pregnant over none pregnant women at about a 2:1 ratio.Read the rest of this post... |
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- Ask A Commercial Astronaut Anything! [Starts Wi...6:42pm | Jul 30, 2010
"I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." -Galileo
There should be a big vote going on today about the future of spaceflight in America. Obama has outlined his new space policy, and has called for the commercial sector to step up and get involved in spaceflight, particularly in low-orbit, satellite, and space launch technologies.
This is going to be a hard sell to a lot of politicians, of course, who will stand to lose many government jobs as programs like Constellation and the Space Shuttle go away.
But the payoff is potentially huge, as private industry looks very eager to take over these tasks. (Check out the commercial spaceflight federation; there's plenty of interest and capability here.) This transition, mind you, has happened before. In the early days, NASA was pretty much entirely a military extension of the government. The first pictures of the Earth from space were from White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico in the 1940s, taken from aboard V-2 rockets.
The US satellites and launch vehicles that made NASA famous were old military projects, starting with Explorer I, which predates even the formation of NASA!
Although NASA was declared to be a civilian organization, the military involvement has remained huge. Of the 12 people who've walked on the Moon, 11 of them are former military. (Jack Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the Moon, was the only civilian.)
But times have changed.
A few years ago, the Ansari X-Prize was awarded to SpaceShipOne, a venture from private industry that launched a human safely up into space. And the era of Commercial Spaceflight had begun.
The X-Prize was named after Anoushah Ansari, the first female private space explorer, and the first astronaut of Iranian descent.
Why do I bring this up? Because it isn't just the spacecraft, the payloads, and the launches that are going to be private in the future.
The astronauts are going to be private, too!
That's right, private astronauts.
So who are these private astronauts going to be? And what types of missions and duties are they going to perform? Well, if you search for commercial astronaut on google, the first non-Wikipedia site you get is astronauts4hire.org, founded in April of this year.
There's an interview with their President up at NewScientist, which I encourage you to read to get some basic answers to such questions as:
- Are commercial space flights really such a big deal for science?
- Being an astronaut is one of the pinnacles of human achievement today, but will it become a lot more like a regular job in future?
- What kind of science does sub-orbital flight allow you to do?
- What's the idea behind Astronauts4Hire?
So here's the deal. Ask them! (That's what the comments here are for!) Ask the big questions that you want a commercial astronaut to answer. They can be easy, hard, political, scientific, personal... whatever you want. If you see a question you like, second (or third, etc.) it. And at the start of next week, I'll select and send the five best questions based on your suggestions and recommendations to them! And I'll post the (unedited) answers here as soon as I get them.
So here's your big chance. Ask a commercial astronaut anything! What do you want to know?
Read the comments on this post...
Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club
- NC Science Festival--Satellite Festival [USA Sc...8:00pm | Jul 30, 2010
The NC Science Festival will bring together more than 100 science-related events Sept. 11-26. Through science talks, hands-on activities, tours, performances and exhibits, North Carolina's science community will be on display to engage and inspire a new generation of scientists.
How will we engage our state in science? By showing citizens of our state science that is...
Diverse. Life is your lab...from age two to 122! Events on our festival schedule reflect the interests of all ages. Kids will get hands-on learning experiences, and adults will dive deep into current science topics with experts. From nature hikes to story hours to the science behind auto racing - there will be something for everyone!
Local. Science is happening everywhere in North Carolina - all the time! Much of the Festival schedule is comprised of science events that happen regularly throughout the state. Hometown breweries, municipal parks and local libraries have all added homegrown North Carolina science events to the festival schedule.
Practical. We're focusing on the topics North Carolinians are curious about - renewable energy, health and wellness and our changing coastline are just a few. Science in North Carolina goes beyond laboratories and into topics that directly affect our state and its citizens.
Our focus on science won't end in September. Response to the North Carolina Science Festival has been so positive that we're planning to make the Festival an annual event!
Want to learn more about the NC Science Festival? Visit our website at <www.ncsciencefestival.org> or follow us on Twitter (@ncscifest).~~Denise Young
NC Science FestivalRead the comments on this post...
Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club
The Abstract
- Everybody Hates Mosquitoes1:00pm | Jul 22, 2010On a hot, humid summer day, I can’t be outside for two minutes before having to swat away mosquitoes who have an insatiable appetite for my sweet blood. However, the minor annoyance of having to soothe my bites with calamine lotion is nothing compared to the major threat mosquitoes pose by spreading diseases like malaria –
- Will it snow? Will it snow? Will it snow?11:56am | Jul 20, 2010I know. It’s a zillion degrees outside, so why am I writing a post about snow? Because new research is out that will help make winter weather predictions more accurate throughout the United States. That’s good news for weather watchers, sure, but it’s great news for governments and utilities – since they can make better
- Who’ll Stop The Rain (Pollution)?12:27pm | Jul 19, 2010Rain is a good thing for our lakes, rivers and streams – it replenishes them. Duh. However, rain can also be really bad news for our lakes, rivers and streams – it can carry lots of pollutants into them. Luckily for all the naiads out there, researchers have come up with a new model to
- Thought for Food2:34pm | Jul 16, 2010Could perennial grains help feed a burgeoning world population and make the planet safer at the same time? A policy forum paper in the journal Science, titled “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains,” co-authored by NC State crop scientist Jim Holland, makes the case in the affirmative. The gist of the paper is that
- It Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White....3:00pm | Jul 14, 2010Maybe it’s just me, but you’d think that the sports industry would be one of the most diverse industries in the world. That might be true for the players – but it’s certainly not true for people in management. NC State’s Heidi Grappendorf recently presented a study showing that race trumps experience in the sports industry. Heidi
The Real Paul Jones
- Some Summer Reading (at UNC Alumni Review)5:52pm | Jul 21, 2010The good folks that the UNC Alumni Review asked a bunch of faculty and administrators what we were planning to read this summer. What a challenge! We’re all a bunch of speed reading overachievers who obviously set up unrealistic goals for ourselves — there are a big bunch of books from every very busy contributor. [...]
- Skirt, Cooking, Hearsay2:35am | Jul 8, 2010As promised, Skirt (Raleigh) is in the newsboxes (free) and online. There I am in a very nice picture taken by Beth Riley for the magazine. The crumbling column is holding up The One True Manning Hall. * Editor, publisher and poet Richard Krawiec writes to say that “The Sound of Poets Cooking” is on the way [...]
- Fred-mania: Slate vid, Economist, NYPost8:21pm | Jun 18, 2010Fred Stutzman’s Freedom has gotten great and well-deserved press as folks realize that even Windows users can now exercise Freedom. Add to that Fred’s new release, Anti-social, which lets you work but not socialize and you have some very nice offerings for controlling your internet tendencies. In the Economist, NPR’s Peter Sagal sings the Freedom song [...]
- Miss Norma C. Forde 1920 – 20102:29pm | Jun 15, 2010Miss Norma C Forde dies — end of a Laurinburg NC era. In the early 70s, I often ate at Miss Forde’s Coffee Shop, but even better on special occasions I would be treated to one of her unique train cakes. The cake — actually several smaller cakes representing an engine, some utility cars and [...]
- MSFT: The Em-Ballmer and the Wiz of Ozzie6:34pm | Jun 4, 2010A couple of years back, I was invited to and did attend the Microsoft Technology Summit 08. (Reports and notes here). My impression, that I discussed with several people but didn’t blog, was that there were two strong forces within MSFT that were at odds with each other. MTS08 put them both in front of [...]
UNC Health Care's Weblog
- Unearthing King Tet: Key protein influences ste...12:00am | Jan 1, 1970UNC researchers reveal how a protein called Tet1 helps stem cells keep their “stemness” in a paper published in Nature.
- TEACCH program to move to AHEC12:00am | Jan 1, 1970Search for permanent director ongoing
- Chris Ellington named a ‘CFO of the Year’ b...12:00am | Jan 1, 1970Chris Ellington, MBA, executive vice president and chief financial officer at UNC Health Care, is one of 17 winners named in the Triangle Business Journal’s CFO of the Year Awards.
- Four specialties at UNC Hospitals ranked among ...12:00am | Jan 1, 1970UNC Hospitals has been ranked in four specialties in U.S. News & World Report's 2010-11 Best Hospitals. This is the 18th year in a row that UNC Hospitals has been ranked in multiple specialties.
- UNC scientists author editorial on internationa...12:00am | Jan 1, 1970Ronald J. Falk, MD, professor of medicine and director of the UNC Kidney Center, and Charles Jennette, MD, professor and chair of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine, are international experts in vasculitis and co-authors of the editorial.
