Posts Tagged ‘ScienceOnline2011’
Nonprofits and social media
Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 1:40 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment“There’s something hopelessly quaint about the little piles of pens and paper on the tables at #scio11.”
“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!) Read more…
Maryn McKenna decodes the MRSA superbug
Monday, January 31, 2011, 12:49 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment
After spending more than a decade reporting on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Maryn McKenna knows plenty of ways we could all die terrible deaths, compliments of nature’s craftiest single-celled organisms. Her coverage of anthrax, polio, bird flu and MRSA eventually earned her the nickname “Scary Disease Girl.”
MRSA bacteria magnified 4780 times. | Image courtesy of the CDC
McKenna channeled that experience into two books, the most recent of which is Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA. It chronicles the emergence of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the modern world and how it became an epidemic. She also blogs for Wired Science’s Superbug.
As a journalist who specializes in the terrifying, McKenna said she’s always careful to balance the appalling details with the empowering facts to educate people about their risks and how to protect themselves.
“People like to be scared, in sort of the same way they like to go to horror movies,” McKenna told me when I caught up with her at ScienceOnline 2011 in Durham, N.C. “On the one hand, I can rely on there being a consistent audience for tales of diseases that sneak up on us and things that make your face melt, things that make you melt from the inside. On the other hand, I have the responsibility as a journalist not to make people so frightened that they will be paralyzed or they will not take steps in their own defense or mischaracterize their own risk.”
Watch an edited version of my interview with her above.
Talk science to me
Thursday, January 27, 2011, 7:20 pm No Comments | Post a CommentGive each geek a blog and you’ll get a taste of the many flavors science can take on.
Some will be scholarly, crusading or probing, others whimsical or funny, but each flavor will reveal something about how its creator ticks. As Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science correspondent and keynote speaker at ScienceOnline 2011, said in an interview: “You can’t help yourself. You ask the question that your soul asks.”
Unlike the more than 200 registered bloggers at ScienceOnline 2011 who mingled Jan. 13 to Jan. 16 in Research Triangle Park, Krulwich doesn’t blog. But his Radio Lab podcasts and Nova videos represented one flavor. Darlene Cavalier, Mary Canady and Brian Malow provided distinctly different flavors. All four talked to Science in the Triangle about their approach. (Watch Krulwich’s interview here.)
Cavalier is a former Disney Publishing executive who outed herself as a former Philadelphia 76s cheerleader to advocate for science literacy. She started Science Cheearleader.com and helps match people without a hard science background with scientists who need help with research such as keeping records of birds’ migratory patterns, taking water samples or measuring the amount of snow fallen.
Watch Cavalier talk about her citizen scientist flavor:
Canady is a biochemistry Ph.D. who switched from bench science to marketing. In 2008, she started Comprendia.com, a virtual bioscience consulting group in San Diego and began thinking about whether marketing and science blogging can mix.
“We’re forging new trails here and need to be creative in thinking about these new relationships - think outside the box, as trite as it may sound,” she said during a ScienceOnline 2011 session.
The iron curtain between advertisement and content is best handled with care as last year’s Pepsigate at Scienceblogs.com showed. More than 20 contributors pulled out after postings by Pepsi scientists were to be published on the first-of-its-kind science blogging network.
But what about scientists posting on corporate blogs, companies sponsoring ask-an-expert forums and businesses underwriting independent blogs?
Here is Canady’s take on the business flavor:
Malow is a professional stand-up comedian with a liberal arts degree who is feeling his way into science comedy.
A voracious reader who is intrigued by astronomy, physics and evolution, he started adding jokes about particles, Star Wars and creationism to his repertoire a few years ago.
He said he wasn’t hired to perform at ScienceOnline 2011 but pulled together an entire show just hours before volunteering to go on stage.
Watch an uncut interview with Malow about his taste of fun:
Why scientists (should) blog
Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 9:17 am 2 Comments | Post a CommentLast weekend, the Triangle hosted ScienceOnline 2011, a lively annual conference spearheaded by the tireless bloggers Bora Zivkovik and Anton Zuiker. Now in its fifth year, the conference has become so popular that registration for 300 spaces sold out this year in less than a day. The participants, according to the conference website, are “scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done.”
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.
Hmm, blueerrghh, eww: Using sounds to tell science stories
Saturday, January 22, 2011, 11:38 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment
Robert Krulwich
Painters develop a style - Van Gogh’s brush strokes, Pollock’s abstract drips, Mondrian’s intersecting black lines. Writers find a voice to express themselves. The signature storytelling of Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science correspondent, uses style and voice. He paints with sounds.
As the keynote speaker at ScienceOnline 2011, which from Jan. 13 through Jan. 16 brought together more than 300 science bloggers in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, Krulwich used some of his science videos and radio podcasts, including a Radio Lab recording from 2008, as examples.
The Radio Lab recording explored brain research into how we make choices and, among other people, featured Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and author of the book “Awakenings.”
In the recording, Sacks talked about the routines he has developed to minimize choices. One involved a weekly trip to the farmer’s market, where he would always buy two pounds of kidneys. One week something went wrong and the vendor misunderstood Sacks. Instead of two pounds, the vendor packed up 22 pounds of kidneys. Too shy to complain, Sacks said, he just took them, paid for them and carried them home.
“I should have thrown away this monstrous, palpitating bag of kidneys,” Sacks said.
“Then followed an increasingly nightmarish period in which I had kidneys for breakfast, for lunch. Kidneys stewed. Sweet kidneys,” he said. “Finally, after about 10 days by which I had eaten about 50, BLUEERRGHH, an incredible nausea and vomiting took hold of me.”
Sacks’ retching sound unequivocally answered the question of how much is too much in a way any kindergartener could understand.
To take the audience along while he discovers how things work is what he aims for, Krulwich said in his keynote talk. The sounds are there to drive home impressions along the journey.
His sound pictures work, they tell a story that you can understand and feel, because Krulwich is inquisitive and an explainer at heart.
“You can’t help yourself,” he said in an interview with Science in the Triangle. “You ask the question that your soul asks.”
This wanting to explain things has gotten him into trouble, as Krulwich acknowledged in the interview. He has been told that it will never make him famous. And it’s hard work. It may look effortless when he breaks down complex topics such as science, technology and economics in a way that his aunt Nancy who got a B- in biology understands. But it isn’t, he said.
Watch the interview with Krulwich:
Watch the science story that he said was the hardest to tell here.
And watch his keynote talk at ScienceOnline2011 here and here and here.
What if science blogging were defined?
Sunday, January 16, 2011, 1:22 am 3 Comments | Post a CommentThe credibility of science blogging is getting much scrutiny at the ScienceOnline 2011 conference, which is under way in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.
Two sessions on Saturday and one on Sunday addressed the quality of online science writing and ethics standards. Two touched on the fact that while blogs are rarely edited, posts published on them can be difficult to distinguish from edited content published in magazines and newspapers and without an editor, mistakes and sloppiness can happen. In the third session, journalistic standards of separating advertisement and content took center stage.
Virginia Hughes, the former community manager of ScienceBlogs and a panelist in the “Science Journalism Online: Better, or Merely Different” session, suggested labeling blogs. Ed Yong, a blogger for Discover Magazine and a panelist at the “Blogs, Bloggers and Boundaries?” session, said a blogger writing for a larger audience encounters more boundaries to get scientific information across and standards help to break down those boundaries.
OK. So what if there was a rating system for blogs, sort of a Good Blogging seal of approval to attract a wider, more general audience from traditional media - particularly from the many regional newspapers that have eliminated local science reporting. What if such a rating system would clearly identify blogs and rate how credible their information is?
The first question that arises is who would define the standards. The second question is who would apply them. Once both questions are answered, science blogging may be more defined, but it would also lose some of the vibrancy that comes from the freedom of not having an editor, of being able to write about the most obscure or the most mundane in any conceivable format.
Technology allows everybody to blog, to say his or her piece without having to pay printing costs. This offers the opportunity to depose authorities who speak from up high.
Sure, some blog posts will be inscrutable, wrong or wrong-headed. But others will be fantastic experiments of creativity. Some of them may even lead us to a way to write about science and make a living doing it.
It is premature to want to define science blogging while the future of online communication is far from clear.
Online science writing must remain as big a tent as possible, avoid institutionalization and leave judgment calls about quality and credibility to the audience.
What would help the audience do that, is more transparency - who the blogger is, where he or she is coming from, links to sources and disclosures of potential conflicts of interest.
