“Best thing about #scio11 is that people will pull out an iPhone or iPad in the middle of a convo and they’re not rude; they’re live-blogging.”

If these two tweets give the impression that ScienceOnline 2011 (or #scio11 in the Twitterverse) was a brave new world populated by geeky early adopters who have foresaken pens, paper, and print in favor of devices and Web 2.0, well, that’s partly true.

After all, it was a conference where it was normal to see panelists consulting notes on their iPads, where attendees did in fact live-blog and live-tweet, and where many sessions had a panelist devoted to monitoring Twitter for questions and comments from the audience. (One aggrieved camera operator told me that people watching the live webcast were tweeting complaints about camera angles!)

But in fact, the conference welcomed a number of people who are open to the opportunities afforded by new media even if they are not cutting edge practitioners.

I became particularly interested in how nonprofits were faring with social media, given the challenges of budget and staffing. For instance, I chatted with Katie Mosher, communications director for North Carolina Sea Grant. While some journalists flew in from California and even Ireland, Mosher or someone on her staff is able to attend each year because it’s local and the registration fee is relatively modest. Her organization is one of the conference sponsors, because, she told me, their interest in and support of the goals of ScienceOnline are strong, even if their use of new media is not advanced.

For dot-orgs like NC Sea Grant, the challenge of using new media is largely a staffing issue; finding staff time to learn what’s available and finding staff time to implement it. That’s why attending — and sponsoring — ScienceOnline is valuable. Mosher says, “This conference helps us understand the potential of what we can do online.”

NC Sea Grant does have a Facebook page, and Mosher says, “Not surprisingly, it tends to have a younger audience than our paid subscribers to Coastwatch magazine.” A new intern is interested in helping the organization get started on Twitter.

For groups with limited budgets and staff time, the challenge is not just learning how to use tools like Facebook and Twitter, but learning to use them effectively. Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance, says that the group’s experiments with Facebook paved the ways for constituents to “talk back.”

“Normally with conservation organizations and nonprofits, we do most of the talking,” he says. “We haven’t had an opportunity to have true social engagement with our constituents. Facebook is allowing that. With blogs like Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science, these are fantastic opportunities for readers, constituents, etc., to talk back to us.” [For the downside of that backtalk, see my post "Why scientists (should) blog."]

Mosher says that NC Sea Grant doesn’t see a lot of commenting on its Facebook page, “but we do see the reposting and sharing.”

Blogging platforms offer nonprofit organizations opportunities to spread the word without having a deep technical support staff. Blogging software is user-friendly, allowing staff to focus on the message, not the technology. Mosher says NC Sea Grant’s marine science newsletter, Scotch Bonnet, has been moved online, using a blog template. The “audience of teachers and other educators have the option to read it on-screen, or to print the hard copy in newsletter layout–to take it with them to read offline. So, the news items have not changed much but the delivery method has.”

Although newsletters have their place, online and on paper, where nonprofits are really shining is in the use of blogs to convey information that the public wants to know. Blogs like Deep Sea News, which MacPherson writes for, present scientifically rigorous information to a public thirsty for scientific knowledge. Mariners Menu gives seafood recipes along with servings of useful information on seafood safety and the cultural history of fisheries. If both of those blogs lead their readers across the internet to learn more about nonprofit organizations protecting our oceans, that’s not a bad thing.

As a first-time attendee and representative of Science in the Triangle, I divided my time between chasing down interviewees and attending panels, which were organized by participants on an online wiki.

One of those interviewees, Katie Mosher of NC Sea Grant, told me that she’d observed a coming together of science blogging and science journalism in the three years since she’d started attending ScienceOnline. More journalists are using the blog form either to replace or to supplement their print or broadcast stories, she said, some of them writing in traditional journalistic objective form and some of them adopting a point of view. Some of those journalists were present at the conference, just as she sees bloggers now attending conferences hosted by organizations like the National Association of Science Writers.

But journalists appeared to be outnumbered at the conference by scientists who blog (or tweet, or both). As a professional writer who frequently covers science, I should perhaps see these scientist-bloggers as competition. Not at all. To me, they are representative of a welcome trend in academics to communicate with the public about scientific findings and (sometimes controversially) the public policy implications of these findings. A scientist-blogger who writes well (perhaps one who attended the panel by Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong on avoiding obfuscation in science writing) and who knows how to attract an audience can have an immediate impact on public understanding of breaking news, as has been the case with the scientists at Deep-Sea News who covered science surrounding the Gulf oil spill. (Bora Zivkovic explains why scientists are such good explainers.)

A scientist-blogger takes some professional risks. Although I was unable to attend “Perils of Blogging as a Woman under a Real Name,” panelist Kate Clancy provides a detailed writeup here, which alludes to the skepticism with which academic colleagues and tenure and promotion panels view blogging and similar “soft” activities.

A scientist-blogger has to deal with certain downsides of being an online presence, most notably “cranks . . . who come onto our sites and leave comments that foment dissension rather than productive commentary,” according to Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance. It happens wherever evolution or climate change are discussed, he said, and he is the target for negative comments every time he writes or is interviewed about the role of climate change in sea level rise and ocean acidification, both threats to coral reefs.

According to MacPherson, the negative commenters are evidence that the general public doesn’t understand the evidence-based nature of science. “People don’t understand how science works,” he said. “It’s not a democratic process. . . . not opinions.”

His sentiments were echoed in “Lessons from Climategate” by panelist Chris Mooney, coauthor of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, who listed these depressing statistics:

• only 18 percent of Americans know a scientist
• just 13 percent follow science and technology news
• 44 percent can’t name a scientific role model; those who can most frequently name Albert Einstein, Al Gore, and Bill Gates, two of whom are not scientists
• in every five hours of cable news, just one minute is devoted to science and technology

According to Mooney, the situation “is ripe for climate skeptics; they are well-trained, skilled communicators who exploit lack of public knowledge and are willing to fight hard in ways climate scientists are not.” His co-panelist Josh Rosenau, who works to defend the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education, said that the language of the attacks against climate science has an eerie parallel in the attacks against evolution. “For 90 years we’ve been fighting same battle,” he said. “Public opinion has not moved. If that happens to climate change we are doomed.”

Mooney and Rosenau were joined on the panel by Thomas C. Peterson, chief scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. Peterson was one of the climate scientists whose emails were hacked and published just a few weeks before the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Although his role in the affair was minor, he was excoriated in blogs (Peterson reminds us that some “science” blogs are unsound scientifically), subjected to harassing calls and emails, and asked by a congressman to produce all emails on the topic (which he did, and which vindicated him). Yet he was still subsequently elected by his peers to be president of the World Meteorological Association’s Commission for Climatology. Clearly, in his professional circles, he is a rock star even if some of the public doesn’t think so.

For Peterson and his co-panelists, the implication is clearly that the public doesn’t understand scientists the way scientists do. Mooney said that the climate emails were taken out of context by people who don’t understand science or scientists. His solution: train “deadly ninjas of science communication”–people who can frame the message and convey science clearly to different constituencies. He wants good communicators to claim the vacancies created when CNN dumped its entire science reporting unit and when daily newspapers gradually reduced their science coverage.

That’s a space that good scientist-bloggers can occupy alongside professional writers: reporting on science from the trenches, bringing scientific research alive, demystifying the scientific method, and unveiling the wealth of unsound science out there.

Notes:

Read my colleague Sabine Vollmer’s post on credibility in science blogging here.

A great resource for finding science blogs is scienceblogging.org.

But along the way from startup to giant, those companies go through a second stage of growth, during which they add employees and revenue but are still growing fairly quickly. It’s these second-stage companies that are the unsung heroes of North Carolina’s economy, according to Penny Lewandowski of the Edward Lowe Foundation. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, 9.7 percent of the resident companies in the state were second stage, but they accounted for almost 35 percent of the state’s jobs.

Penny Lewandowski, director of entrepreneurship development, Edward Lowe Foundation.

The same trend is true in other regions of the country, says Lewandowski, where second stage companies account for a disproportionate number of jobs. (Readers interested in researching trends in company size and job creation can consult the web site youreconomy.org, another initiative of the foundation.)

“These companies are carrying the heavy load of job creation,” Lewandowski says.

Lewandowski, the foundation’s director of entrepreneurship development, came to the Triangle a few weeks ago for the North Carolina Companies to Watch (CTW) awards presentation. The CTW program, sponsored by CED in partnership with the Edward Lowe Foundation, honors privately held second stage companies, those with 10-99 employees and between $1 million and $50 million in revenue. The winners demonstrated exceptional revenue and/or job growth, innovation in marketing or use of technology, and community involvement.

In all, 25 firms were named North Carolina Companies to Watch in the first annual competition. (The complete list appears at the end of this article.)

443 new jobs in a down economy

It’s important to recognize second stage companies, Lewandowski says, because local economies grow through expansion of existing companies rather than the relocation of other companies to a region. “Grow your own” seems to work better than recruitment as an economic engine, in her observation.

As Lewandowski pointed out in her remarks at the awards ceremony, in the four years ending in 2009, the winning companies alone have generated $334 million in revenue and added 443 employees. And that’s in a down economy.

Joan Siefert Rose, president of CED.

Joan Siefert Rose, president of CED, which assists entrepreneurs in the Research Triangle and throughout the state, worked with the foundation to bring Companies to Watch to North Carolina. “We thought it was a great fit and an extension of CED’s work,” she says. That’s in part because many of the startups helped by CED have now successfully transitioned to being second stage companies. “They’ve created jobs and value” for the state, she says, echoing Lewandowski’s observation.

Winners a snapshot of N.C.’s “innovation economy”

In addition, the 25 winners “paint the picture of what the state’s entrepreneurial scene looks like,” Rose says. The winning companies are diverse, representing manufacturing, gaming, software as a service, health sciences and online retailers, a mix that accurately profiles what Rose calls the “innovation economy” in North Carolina.

The winners also included a mortgage firm that doubled its revenue and “a staffing firm that changed their business model, leading to more customers in 2009 than the prior three years combined,” according to Lewandowski. Other winning companies broke new ground in water treatment and solar photovoltaics.

Companies to Watch is a recognition program created by the Edward Lowe Foundation, which supports second stage entrepreneurial companies through a variety of programs, mostly aimed at entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) like CED. “Second stage companies have different needs from startups,” Lewandowski says, “and we help ESOs understand how to serve them.”

Winners and their families at the Companies to Watch awards banquet. Left photo: Roland Johnson, CEO of Piedmont Pharmaceuticals, with his wife and mother. Middle photo: Jean Orelian, CEO of SciMetrika, with his wife Valerie and a friend. Right photo: April Mills of Dickson Hughes talks with Isaak Kunkel, vice president of engineering for winner Digitalsmiths. Photos courtesy CED.

Nominations for 190 companies were received for North Carolina’s competition. The winners were:

• 3tailer

• Affinergy Inc.

• BlueStripe Software, Inc.

• Bronto Software

• Clinipace Worldwide

• Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems, Inc.

• DataChambers, LLC

• Digitalsmiths

• Entex Technologies Inc.

• goodmortgage.com

• Inlet Technologies

• Kyma Technologies, Inc.

• Liquidia Technologies, Inc.

• Piedmont Pharmaceuticals, LLC

• PocketGear, Inc.

• SciMetrika, LLC

• Semprius, Inc.

• ShareFile

• ShopBot Tools, Inc.

• The Select Group

• Themis Group, Inc.

• TheraSim, Inc.

• TransEnterix, Inc.

• Tranzyme Pharma

• Yap

Watch CED’s web site for announcements about next year’s competition.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The first is Launch Day, a Durham event designed to match entrepreneurs with mentors and peers who can help your company grow. The second Launch Day (the first was held in May) will take place on October 5 at the American Tobacco Campus.

An entrepreneur presents his business plan at the first Launch Day at the American Tobacco Campus, May 2010.

Entrepreneurs can register for the opportunity to make a six-minute presentation about their company, and members of the public and the business community will vote on the most promising candidate. The winner will receive a package of resources that is still being finalized, says Launch Day organizer Scott Kelly; it could include sales and marketing assistance, a brainstorming lunch with a venture capital firm, legal advice, or hosting solutions.

The companies presenting at Launch Day should already exist and have a product that is launched or close to launching, with revenues of up to $1 million. Technology companies are ideal for this program, says Kelly, because of their scalability—ability to achieve high growth in a way that traditional companies (apparel, food service) cannot. High-growth, early stage companies in fields like gaming, IT, software as a service, and medical technology are good candidates for Launch Day, he says.

The presentations should focus on what the company needs over the next six to twelve months “to achieve hockey stick projections,” Kelly says. “That could be beta testers, a contact at Costco, office space, legal help.” Even those who don’t win the competition may find the help they need from established business people who will attend, listen, vote and network.

One thing the presenters are unlikely to get is funding. Even though KeySource Bank (where Kelly works) and 8 Rivers Capital are sponsors of Launch Day, it is not intended to match entrepreneurs with venture capital. “This is more of a bootstrap event,” says Kelly. “A pitch for community help.”

What many entrepreneurs need more than capital, Kelly says, is sales assistance, which he hopes to make part of the prize package. “The problem with startups is they fail because they don’t sell enough,” he says. “It’s a difficult transition from being a product company to being a sales engine. The person who started the company is not necessarily a sales person.”

Six minutes may not seem like very much time for a presentation, but it’s expansive compared to the Start Something Twitter pitch contest sponsored by CED. This contest is ongoing and closes on September 30. Using either Twitter or the comments section of CED’s blog, new or established entrepreneurs can make a pitch of no more than 140 characters. A judge’s panel will select five finalists, and the winner will be announced at CED’s housewarming party on October 28. That party also celebrates the organization’s move to American Tobacco Campus in Durham.

Like Launch Day, CED’s Start Something contest rewards its winner with a bundle of prizes including professional consultation and a Lenovo notebook computer.

Is it a coincidence that both of these competitions have an American Tobacco flavor? Within a few weeks, I hope to explore downtown Durham’s growing identity as an incubator for high-tech startups.

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

But it is a Big Deal. It is the ‘official’ conference of the World Wide Web. Yup, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was there. I saw him, though I did not talk to him. I mean, what excuse could I come up with to approach him? Ask him to autograph my web browser?

This year, WWW2010 (which everyone pronounced as ‘dub-dub-dub-twenty-ten’ reminding me of a cardiac arrhythmia), was really four conferences fused into one, or rather three other conferences piggybacking onto the main program: Web Science Conference 2010, 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility and the one I was most interested in (and could afford to attend) the FutureWeb conference.

Of course, whenever I go to a conference I do two things: one is what everyone does – try to learn as much as possible and meet interesting people; the other thing is a professional deformation of sorts – I observe the details of the organization and try to figure out how to use what I see for the next ScienceOnline.

This is the second conference I attended at the Raleigh Convention Center and this time I felt better about the space – it did not seem so overwhelmingly enormous this time. Perhaps there were more people this time. Or perhaps it’s because the place was filled with vendor booths, including by Google, Facebook, Lulu.com and RedHat. Or perhaps the organizers used the space better. Or perhaps the people were less formal in their dress, behavior and mindset which made the whole experience more pleasurable.

Number 1 requirement for a conference is coffee. And there was plentiful, at all times, both on the ground floor and upstairs, as well as pastries, cake and fruit. Grade: A

Number 2 requirement for a conference is good, free wifi with tons of bandwidth. And WWW2010 got it. It was just as stable and just as fast as at ScienceOnline2010, which says something Grade: A+

Number 3 are people. Apart from the ‘home team’ I mentioned above, it was great to finally meet some of the interesting locals that I only knew from online before, including the entire HASTAC crew led by Cathy Davidson, Annie Antón (watch this video where I first heard of her some time ago), Paolo Mangiafico, Greg Corrin and Negar Mottahedeh. And then the non-locals, e.g., Doc Searls and Kathy Gill.

It was also great to see again, after quite a while, old friends – danah boyd, Dan Conover, Janet Edens, Hilary Spenser and Kate of Save Our Sounds who I first met at the AAAS meeting in San Diego back in February. I really wanted to catch up with Dan and Janet so we went out to dinner and drinks on Thursday afternoon and spent hours talking. Grade: A+

Number 4 requirement for a successful conference is an engaged audience. And there sure was – check out the #fw2010 (futureweb) and #www2010 tweets – there were lots! And people on several panels were really good at monitoring the twitter backchannel and even tweeting themselves during their sessions (Negar Mottahedeh was the champion of this!).

Unfortunately some of the panels were more corporate in tone, with PowerPoint presentations and barely any interaction with the audience besides a couple of Q&As at the very end. In the Public Health session all but the last panelist have even left the room before we could ask them any questions, for example. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Certainly Keynotes are, by design, one-to-many, and most panels I attended were quite nicely many-to-many in a very unconference-y style (especially the one on Social Media where the dialogue between the panelists and the audience started right at the begining), so it’s a bummer that some of the more corporate as well as more academic types did not grok it or were not specifically trained for a modern conference format. Grade: B

Number 5 in my book is diversity. While the attendees as a whole seemed quite balanced and diverse, the talks and panels were quite white-male-dominated or white-male-exclusive, with just a couple of great exceptions, most notably danah boyd. The opposing goals of having the people with the greatest name recognition (which are marketing gold for a meeting) or having a diverse group in which everyone feels comfortable and “an insider” are hard to reconcile. It is not surprising that WWW2010, being so Big Deal, erred somewhat toward the former, while smaller, more obscure conferences (like #scio10) can push more for the latter. But don’t get me wrong – I’ve been to many conferences with a much higher testosterone concentration (and lower melanin) than this one, it just wasn’t quite as perfect as theoretically possible. Grade: B-

Number 5 is the program itself. And that was good. Of course, I had to choose what to attend at each time-slot, but there is excellent coverage and videos of everything here, so you can take your own picks. Part of the deal with FutureWeb conference was that we could also attend three of the main WWW2010 Keynote lectures, by Vint Cerf (Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist), danah boyd (Microsoft and Harvard University’s Berkman Center) and Carl Malamud (president and founder of public.resource.org ) so I did not waste that opportunity and attended all three. Cerf was impressive on search, cloud computing, and universal access. Malamud was funny, yet wise, with his advice on how to deal with bureacracies with outdated ways of thinking and still get things done.

For me, danah boyd’s talk was the very best hour of the entire conference – I had to stop live-tweeting as I wanted to listen and focus. Danah packs her talks with information and insight and I did not want to miss anything. And I was not dissappointed. Both in her keynote address and the interview immediatelly afterwards, danah stressed several points but I want to highlight two:

First, many people are now harvesting information from social networks and running it through mathematical models. Then they get smug about it and assume more than data warrant. Just because you collected a huge number of tweets, for example, does not mean that your sample is representative – which racial, socioeconomic and age groups tend to keep their accounts private, or tend not to use hashtags, keywords or Twitter conventions the way others do? You missed them. And even if you didn’t, are the results of the analysis meaningful. Data, like Soylent Green, are People. Without looking at who they are, what they say and why they say it, the most impressive computing models are suspect.

Second, there is a difference between Public and Publicized. If you put something online with a hope it will go viral and be seen by as many strangers as possible, you have done broadcasting – what you did was Publicizing. But if you put something online with an unspoken understanding that it is targeted at a relatively limited number of people, usually personal friends (on Facebook) or regular readership (on blogs and Twitter), that is only Public, not Publicized. Taking that kind of stuff posted online by someone and spreading it to a much wider audience of strangers (or using that data for ‘scientific research’) is a violation of privacy. It is at best unthinking and tone-deaf, at worst unethical.

And this is the category error that Facebook just made with their new privacy rules. There is a lot of writing online about Facebook settings these days, and the mood of WWW2010 was decidedly anti-Facebook. Some people ‘unliked’ all their ‘likes’ there during sessions discussing privacy. Someone even deleted his facebook account right on the spot, after danah’s keynote.

Everyone knows that everything you post online is ‘fair game’, it is googleable, findable and potentially spreadable. This is the reason why some people need to be anonymous or pseudonymous online. But putting stuff online is not automatically a licence for everyone and anyone to take it and spread it around. Before you do this to someone, stop and think. Perhaps ask if that is OK. Much of the stuff posted online is posted online to make it easy for friends and grandma to see, not for all the world to see. Not every facebook status update or every tweet is a news broadcast. Turn on your brain before you start treating Public (but meant to be limited) communication between friends into a Publicized flashing banner on every corner of the Internet. Remember that people who post stuff online are Soylent Green – they are People.

A great recent example of something Public becoming Publicized against the original intentions of the author was #boobquake. The original idea was an inside joke, meant to be read by perhaps a thousand regular blog readers, some Twitter followers and Facebook friends, not much more. But then someone came in and took it and ran with it. Suddenly this went viral. What could she do? How to deal with this sudden change in expectations? One solution would have been to delete everything and lock everything down – it was not yours to take in the first place, so now you won’t be able to see it and spread it any more. The other solution, the one Jen McCreight chose, was to play along and to switch from Public to Publicized and milk that moment of fame for all its worth and for a good cause. But for this to work, she needed to rethink and rewrite the original to make it fit for Publicized consumption, so she wrote an update with clarification and then a number of updates about the phenomenon. It was out of her hands, but she could still steer it to some extent and make sure it gets used for the intended purpose. Good for her – but she is an experienced blogger, and an activist with an agenda. What if it was some kid, or n00b, or grandma, completely unprepared for it all? Was it her fault she put stuff online? No, you were a schmuck to take her stuff and run with it. Perhaps unethical.

See the full text of danah’s talk for more details, and a recent interview with her on the topic.

Later that day I attended (and vigorously participated from my seat in the front row) the Future of Social Networks and the Internet panel with Chris DiBona, Henry Copeland, Zeynep Tufekci, Dave Recordon and Wayne Sutton, moderated by Fred Stutzman. Henry reminded us that it took 150 years after Gutenberg printed a bible until the founding of the first daily newspaper and that the current situation on the Web is far too early (the oldest blogs are 13 years old) to be considered developed and mature. We need to be patient and watch, not proclaim the experiment a success or a failure so early in its history. Several mentions of the Dunbar Number, in some cases used correctly, in others not, reminded me I need to get back to my project of studying the application of the concept to the Web and writing a piece about it, as much of the discussion focused on the way the Web is affecting our relationships in the real world, for better or for worse.

The Future of the Media panel was the most contentious. Out of six people on it, there was a clear split down the middle: three people who ‘get it’ and three who don’t – on one side were Michael Clemente (lumbering dinosaur), Sam Matheny (a more limber dinosaur), Penny Muse Abernathy (a bird-like dinosaur), still walking yet fully unaware they are already extinct, and on the other side were highly evolved birds: Paul Jones, Dan Conover and Doc Searls. One has to give it to Michael Clemente – knowing that the camera’s rolling and everyone’s livetweeting, he stuck to his Fox News talking points, even asserting, with a straight face, that there is a wall between news and editorial content on Fox News (though that was devastatingly demonstrated to be wrong by Jon Stewart – the opinionators make the news which the news-heads report the next day).

I came in a little late (as our waiters at lunch were incredibly slow with food and checks) into the The Future of Privacy and the Internet session, with a star-studded collection of panelists, including Annie Antón of NCSU who I wanted to meet for quite a while. Much was said about legal and policy aspects of privacy. Antón noted that privacy settings on many social networking sites, including Facebook, are complex and counter-intuitive and that many people (aside from techies) do not know what these are and how to set them. She also said that this is not a generational issue – some people know and some don’t regardless of age. But I think that this will change with time – both the people’s skills at controlling their privacy and the societal understanding of what privacy means and where to draw the line. In 20 years, when the employers are all people with decades experience online, they will find Facebook profiles (or equivalent) completely devoid of humanizing elements (including drinking party pictures) suspect – is this person really that boring or is that an intentionally clean profile of someone with Presidential (or at least Harvard) aspirations? People will, over the years, become increasinly better at managing their online personas, making sure that searches bring up to the top both their accomplishments and their human sides in perfect measures.

The The Future of Public Health session was the biggest disappointment for me. It was not even a panel – four people got up, gave their PowerPoint presentations and left the room before any questions could be asked. And their presentations fell short of my expectations – I know how much stuff is going on out there, but each speaker focused only on what he/she is currently working on, their own projects, not the state of the field as a whole.

Finally, the conference ended with a Bang – an exciting panel on The Future of Learning:

“Session organizer was Cathy Davidson co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (http://www.hastac.org/). Panelists included Laurent Dubois, a Duke University historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean; Mark Anthony Neal, accomplished author, one of the foremost scholars of Black popular culture in America and blogger at the New Black Man website; Negar Mottahedeh, she received national notice for staging the first-ever Twitter Film Festival as well as for serving as a communications node in the Iranian election protests.; Tony O’Driscoll, co-author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.”"

These people are all on the cutting edge of the educational revolution involving understanding the way technology (Web) is changing the world, the way students operate, and the way education should be done. Their students use the Web in the classroom, publicly grade each other (leading to a much greater motivation and effort and greater quality of work), use Twitter to communicate, and are savvy at using the Web to find information. One person in the audience said that ‘if I open my laptop, my focus on you, the teacher, drops down from 100% to 0%’, I got up and said ‘if I open my laptop and you have a problem with me not listening – you are doing it wrong: you are standing in front and talking. Instead, you should be here with me, next to me, working with me on my laptop.’ I also added that there is an existing model for a more engaging model of a teacher-student relationship and that is graduate school where the teacher/mentor does not lecture, but assigns a project and mentors the student through it.

Program – grade: A

I want to end this summary with a huge Kudos to the Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, an Elon/Pew Internet Project which has been ongoing for quite a few years now, guided by center director Janna Quitney Anderson. The Elon students from the project manned a booth, attended (anywhere between two and six of them per room) every session and manned the cameras (both the big professional camera and a bunch of little Flip cameras) in each session. They set up the website, covered every single session and talk with a nice blog post and associated articles and videos, livetweeted, used Facebook for organizing and archiving stuff, collected photographs on Flickr and videos on YouTube. They were not just very good, but also very fast – before a session is over the clips from its beginning were already up on YouTube! And at least one of them writes an insightful blog – Kassondra Cloos. Grade: A+

The video coverage was so awesome (and it was the weakest aspect of ScienceOnline2010 organization), that I am seriously considering hiring the Elon student crew to do the same job at ScienceOnline2011. I’ll be in touch with them soon.

I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

I have to say that the trip was very much worth making – the exhibit is excellent! I like the way the exhibit is making good use of the space – so many exhibits feel cluttered and an all-out assault on all of one’s senses. Upon entering the room, it looks quite sparse. Yet, once I started going around I saw how much it actually covers, how well organized the exhibit layout is, how much information (including a lot of new-to-me information) is included and presented so very clearly and tastefully, and how much it has something for everyone independent of age, background or interest. And of course – the fossils! Absolutely amazing and stunning fossils! From the magnificent Megalodon jaws, to some of the strangest teeth arrangements one has ever seen in any jaw of any animal.

Then, exhausted and a little faintly from the lack of food yesterday (yes, it was a busy day), I entered the lecture hall afraid I’d fall asleep or pass out in the middle of the talk. I need not have worried – Adam Summers is an amazing speaker. I was able not just to pay attention throughout, I was excited throughout the talk. For a jaded biologist and blogger, when many public lectures tend to present stuff already well known to me, it was refreshing to keep learning new stuff every couple of minutes or so. And not just new factoids, but new questions and new ways of thinking about them – why are sharks larger than bony fish, why sharks have no bone, how do sharks swim, how do sharks and bony fish manage to swim very fast, etc. Questions I never asked myself before.

There were things in there that are outside my realm of expertise, for which I am essentially a layman: engineering principles, a formula I am unfamiliar with, a couple of graphs….yet all of that was made very clear on an intuitive level. How? Because Adam is really good at using analogies (“think of this as…”) and metaphors (snuck into the description without any warning). Be it water-filters, armor, stacks of coins, or houses made of sponges, it all becomes vivid and immediately makes sense.

It is also obvious that a lot of research went into this, yet very few actual data were shown – only the key data that are essential to make the point. This is a public lecture – there is no need to drown the audience in gazillions of graphs and discussions of statistics. The slides, including the images and brief video clips were both beautiful and essential for grasping the point he is making. And then there was quite a lot of humor, mainly of the self-deprecating kind making fun of himself and his students in the context of scientist stereotypes – how they look, talk, think and behave.

All in all – well done. Who ever said that scientists don’t know how to communicate to lay audience, eh?

While Dr.Eggleston conducts research in several areas (and several geographic locationa), in this talk he focused on the ecology, conservation, and restoration of oyster reefs in North Carolina.

Improvements in oyster harvesting technology a century ago almost immediatelly decimated the oyster populations in the estuaries of North Carolina rivers and Atlantic coast. A century of harvesting, particularly harsh during the Great Depression and WWII, led to the current record lows:

Oyster beds are important for more than just a potential source of food for humans. They serve as refuge for young fish from their predators, they break the tides and potentially slow down erosion, and the oysters themselves, as filter-feeders, clean up the water from organic materials. Thus healthy oyster beds are important components of a healthy coastal ecosystem.

While preserving existing ecosystems is always easier, cheaper and more effective than recostructing them – it may take decades for ‘artificial’ ecosystems to start functioning fully as the the natural ones – once the ecosystem is destroyed there is not much one can do but try to rebuild it from scratch. And rebuilding from scratch can be expensive, thus it has to be done in a way that is most likely to be successful, i.e., informed by rigorous scientific research. And this is where Dr.Eggleston and his colleagues come in.

Mathematization of biology in the 1930s-40s by the likes of Fisher, Haldane and Wright was not primarily concerned with conservation issues – those were the beginning of formalization of evolutionary theory and ecology. Yet many of the models built at the time and refined since have important roles to play in conservation decision making. Most of the models have been tested primarily in the terrestrical ecosystems, so more work is needed to establish how they apply to marine environments where movement of individuals is much easier, energy-efficient and faster than on dry land.

The most important ecological model in this case is that of a metapopulation that is composed of a number of small populations with some migration between them. The concepts of ‘sources’ – populations with large population growth from which surplus individuals tend to emigrate from – and ‘sinks’ – populations which would not be able to sustain themselves if not for individuals that immigrate from elsewhere – are important concepts to keep in mind when devising conservation programs. Analysis of a metapopulation provides the answer to the question if one large space needs to be conserved or rather a number of smaller spaces. In terrestrial ecosystems, it appears that preservation of one large space is a better solution, but studies of marine environments to date suggest this may not be the case there.

Dr.Eggleston’s research is testing the theoretical models, as well as simultaneously using the models to devise conservation strategies. With help from a gadget-happy fisherman, they mapped the entire ocean floor of the bay.

Then, they built about a dozen centers of artificial oyster beds out of B-grade rock and populated those with oysters. Then they started sampling and monitoring the beds as well as the entire bay. A collaborator mapped the direction of water flow within it, which they then tested by monitoring the movement of oyster larvae which are poor swimmers and are thus passively transported by the water currents. The data matched the model quite well.

Interestingly, oyster larvae decide where, after two weeks of passive swimming in the currents, to swim down an attach to the substrate by sensing dopamine. The source of dopamine are other oysters already there. This makes sense, as the likelihood of successful reproduction depends on close proximity (and temporal synchronization) of other oysters during spawning.

The researchers then evaluated each center for several parameters. What they found is that some centers show fast growth, other centers good survival rates, other centers broad range of dispersal of larvae, and yet other centers evolved a level of resistance to disease, and yet no single center was “good at everything”. What they found instead was that, altough neither one of the centers was a net source of oysters, the system (metapopulation) as a whole can sustain itself. Thus, they conclude that conservation should not focus on just one or two ‘best’ locations, but the large area as a whole. Furthermore, the implications of the results of the study is that several more such centers need to be built for the oyster population to become fully self-sustaining as well as a potential source of oysters outside of the area (where presumably they could be farmed for food).

They still do not have the data – too early for that but they are working on it – about the ability of these artificial oyster beds to serve as refuge for young fish against predators, or about the ability of the oysters to clean up the water. But it looks promising for now.

The main idea of the meeting is that evolutionary theory has something to offer in the realm of understanding human societies and thus shaping policies governing aspects of human activity. In the domain of economics, for example, it appears that the classical economics (i.e., the Chicago School) is unbeatable in the corridors of power. Yet, it is essentially faulty and this has been shown many times, including by numerous Nobel Prize winners in Economics. The idea that humans are rational (and perfectly informed) economic players is just plain wrong. Yet our economic policy is built upon that error. Perhaps developing and using models from evolutionary theory can finally bring the well-past-due overturn of the faulty economics and become the basis for smart, modern economic policies. The work is just beginning.

Perhaps the insights from the study of social and eusocial animals, mainly insects, can inform the discussion about social behavior of humans. How do simple rules for simple brains result in complex behaviors of, for example, bee swarms? Perhaps if we used such simple rules, instead of relying on every individual human being highly intelligent, impartial and rational, we can devise policies that will actually work, in various domains of human activity.

Taking into account multi-level selection models of evolution one can start understanding the differences between small-group societies (e.g, in rural areas) and large-group societies (e.g., in large cities), why those result in diefferent behaviors of individual humans living there, and why the differences between the two types of groups often lead to civil wars (often wars we usually do not see or describe as civil wars due to our own myopia, not realizing that a war between two adjacent regions may, in fact, be a war between the city and the country “mentality” – something quite obviously applicable to the US red vs. blue states, really small-town conservatism vs. big-city liberalism). Why imposing large-group organization (i.e., a President and a Parliament, i.e., a ‘centralized government’ of a unified country) may not work in a country like Afghanistan in which the society was always organized via local kin-and-friend networks – evolutionary theory can open our eyes on such questions.

This group of people, coming from a variety of backgrounds including history, anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, ethology and evolutionary biology, will try to tackle these and similar questions over the years to come. Interestingly, the meeting was apparently an Unconference (though they have never heard of the term before), with discussions starting some months before the event (I presume online), leading to the choices of topics actually discussed in sessions which were free-style discussions, not speeches.

One of the panelists noted that interdisciplinary meetings are usually excercises in misunderstanding, as each participant brings in different language and different axioms, but not this meeting – people actually made an effort, in advance, to study and learn other people’s perspectives before encountering them in the sessions in real life. This made the meeting, judging from the enthusiasm of all panelists, a resounding success.

This was the first time I ever visited NESCent (though I was excited when I first heard about its founding five years ago) and it was really nice to see Craig McClain and Robin Ann Smith again, as well as to meet, for the first time in real life, John Logsdon who blogs on Sex, Genes and Evolution and has come to NESCent for a nine-year sabbatical.