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Solo09: What’s in a blog?

August 29, 2009 By

What is a blog? Why do we write blogs? What do we write about and who do we write them for? Those were some of the questions discussed at Science Online London, on 22 August at the Royal Institution. Some great discussion also took place at the FringeFrivolous Unconference event at the offices of Mendeley the evening before.

It is generally accepted (among bloggers!) that blogging has a role to play in science – but what is it? Within the category of science there are many kinds of blogs out there – blogs written by professional science writers as showcases of their work, science news blogs that report new results, blogs at publishing companies that invite discussion on their publications, personal blogs by professional scientists. Each of these have their own purpose and audience, opportunities and challenges.

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Thanks for Science Online London!

August 28, 2009 By

Last Saturday I attended the Science Online London conference (Solo09) at the Royal Institution in London, an event that brought together a bunch of people involved in science and the web in some shape or form. There were working scientists who blog, like myself, from all areas of science, people working for blogging communities like Scienceblogs.com, representatives from the big publishers in science like Nature, software developers and many more. It was a really fun and interesting meeting and I’m glad that I hopped over the Channel for it.

The evening before I went along to an Unconference hosted by publishing company Mendeley at their office in Clerkenwell. I imagined an Unconference to be something like Fight Club for geeks but in fact it was pretty non-weird – it just means the participants decide the discussion topics on the spot by vote and the format is altogether a little more relaxed. I’m not sure if it’s typical of all Unconferences, but the alcohol a’plenty was also a nice touch. Thanks Mendeley!

I’ve got a couple of posts about the event up my sleeve but I first wanted to post a link to this very useful post on the blog of Martin Fenner, one of the event’s organisers. He’s gathered all the blog posts that have appeared after the conference, including his own thoughts. Go take a look, there’s some excellent stuff there – although there’s so much, I can’t keep up! Lots of good discussion and links in the Science Online FriendFeed room.

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Of men, women and chimpanzees

June 14, 2009 By
Holy bananas I got a Hubble fellowship!

Dr. Smith was ectstatic he'd been shortlisted for a fellowship

Last week I listened to an excellent podcast at Slate.com on how to get more women into science. I can’t find the podcast anymore but the transcript is here, with lots of interesting links. In it, Ray Fisman reports results of a study into academic achievement in maths and science at the US Air Force Academy. The study found that replacing male instructors with a female one has a dramatic impact on the performance of the female students in the class, bringing it level with that of the men. Specifically,

women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male classmates, even after accounting for students’ SAT scores. The gap in performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point gender gap evaporated.

Bottom line: hire more women. [Read more...]

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Gender bias in peer-review: the final word?

June 1, 2009 By

It’s a much-quoted argument by advocates of “equal opportunities” in science that scientific papers written by female authors are consistently ranked lower in peer review than those of their male colleagues. Indeed, several studies (Bornmann et al, 2007; Budden et al., 2008; not exclusively in physics & astronomy) have appeared to indicate that women authors don’t fare as well in peer review, be it for papers, grant applications or fellowship proposals. It’s a popular topic of discussion in the “Women in Science” circles as a clear-cut, proven area where discrimination on the basis of gender takes place. [Read more...]

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Misconduct in astronomy: What you said

May 10, 2009 By
ethicspollbars_0705

Check out the original poll here. But your votes won't be counted anymore. The numbers are percentages.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a poll asking readers “Which of the following constitutes “misconduct” in science?”, followed by a number of scenarios. I finally got round to putting the results into a pretty little graph to show the distribution of your picks. For the statistics aficionados, the numbers reflect the percentage of total votes that was given to that particular option; it isn’t possible to see who-clicked-what with the WordPress-offered polls. [Read more...]

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