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An open access paper just out looks at science blogging. According to the abstract, the paper

… focuses on one of the ICTs [Information and Communication Technologies] that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.

Bora has a critical look at it, as does Cosmic Variance. Panda’s Thumb is one of the 11 blogs examined in the paper.

One of the main conclusions of the (pretty chancy) analysis is that

To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating.

The author goes on to suggest that

An interesting practical experiment would also be to reverse the roles of writers and readers and invite the so called “ordinary persons” to create and publish science blogs, i.e., to engage them in the practices of science blog writing rather than reading or commenting.

Hm? Why would that be interesting? And, for that matter, “ordinary persons” have the same access to blogging software as do scientists; nothing (except disinclination or disinterest) is stopping “ordinary persons” from blogging about anything they wish.

The author clearly has a particular model in mind as a referent, implicit in the title of the paper: “Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities.” That’s tantamount to “blogs as an extension of science education.” But while many of us are interested in science education, that’s an institutional goal while blogs are, by and large, personal vehicles. It seems to me that institutionalization is not a state to be desired. (After writing this paragraph, I found that Scholarly Kitchen made much the same point.)

(I invite my PT colleagues to comment. This post is based on a fast read-through with contractors waiting to abduct me to force a decision on the color of house siding.)

Tai “Butterstick” Shan, the panda born at the National Zoo in Washington DC and displayed up above, is going back to China. CNN has a report on his farewell party.

I updated the comment system this weekend. If you are seeing comment failures, try clearing your web cache. That should allow you to download updated javascript files. Still having problems, post them here.

Firefox 3.5 is out. To celebrate, I’m going to try out the new video tag.

And all the peasants rejoiced!

Well, shoot. We missed the 5^th anniversary of the founding of Panda’s Thumb. Belated happy blogiversary to us! :)

Comments are broken due to a system upgrade. I’ll fix them later today.

Update

Fixed.

I’m working on a little education project for this site that requires a good binomial random number generator written in javascript. I’m having a hard time finding a library written and would rather not write one myself. So I’m wondering if any of the tech-savvy people who read this blog are willing to port the code for generating a binomial random variable from GSL to javascript. You can depend on the jQuery library if it helps.

Any takers?

Only two weeks remain, and there is a lack of nominations from the Panda’s Thumb. Your mission, readers, is to find our best articles from the last year and nominate them from the Panda’s Thumb. The rumor I’m hearing is that anti-anti-evolution blog posts are going to get the shiv this year, so try to focus on posts that are not responses to the stupidity that is (“intelligent design”) creationism.

Just click the image to nominate some posts of ours.

By Bora Zivkovic

First, there was the First NC Science Blogging Conference. Then, there was the Second NC Science Blogging Conference. And yes, we will have the Third one - renamed ScienceOnline’09 to better reflect the scope of the meeting: this time bigger and better than ever.

ScienceOnline’09 will be held Jan. 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Please join us for this free three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators, students, journalists, writers, publishers, Web developers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for promoting the public understanding of science.

The conference is organized jointly by BlogTogether, the North Carolina bloggers’ group, and WiSE @ Duke, the Women in Science and Engineering organization at Duke University, with help from Sigma Xi and other sponsors.

The people behind the organization are Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic (aka Coturnix) and Abel Pharmboy, with additional generous help by Brian Russell and Paul Jones.

The conference homepage/wiki is now live! Go and explore!

Registration is free and it is now open - go and Register right now!

See who has already registered.

Help us develop the Program.

Perhaps your organization/company would like to be a sponsor? Or you’d like to volunteer?

Just like last two times, we are preparing the publication of the Science Blogging Anthology and, this time, we’ll try to really have it ready and up for sale at the conference itself. This year’s Guest Editor is Jennifer Rohn and you should really start submitting your entries now.

For news and updates about the conference (and anthology), follow the ScienceOnline09 blog, or the Facebook Event page, or the FriendFeed room or check Bora’s SO’09 category on his blog.

Hope to see many of you in January!

I’ve upgraded the software and plugins on this site. Some files have changed and you may need to clear your cache to get the new files. If you have problems commenting, clear your browser cache.

The most noticeable new feature is client-side validation of comment format. If your comment is not properly formed, changes will be made to it and you will be notified of the differences before you submit. It’s not perfect or smart, but it gets the job done. I will implement “give me original comment” and “don’t validate” options if it becomes a burden to anyone.

Well the school is starting up again, and this blog will be slower than usual for a while until the authors get into the swing of things.

On my side of things, I have an upgrade planned for site now that Movable Type 4.21 has been released. I’m currently running it on my blog and will implement it when I’m satisfied with it and have enough time on a weekend.

I’ve also revealed a secret project that I’ve been toying with off and on for a few months: pre-submission comment validation. I hope to enable this technology on PT, to help out those of you who find writing valid markup difficult. However, I need y’all to go give it a hard time to find the bugs.

Three years ago I mentioned that the creator of the Sims was working on a new game-of-life called Spore. It now looks to be nearly done and they’ve offered an early showing of their “creature creator” to celebrities and choice bloggers to help advertise their game. Although inspired by the science of evolution, the developers have taken plenty of artistic liberties with the concept to make this game. Don’t expect Spore to be anything like Avida anytime soon.

While I tried to make a Prof. Steve Steve inspired creature, it didn’t work too well. Instead I opted on creating a “Howling Nightmare”. This is the creature’s description:

Howling Nightmare, Alouatta pandas, is a flying carnivore covered in hard armor and known for its powerful howls and painful bites. It typically hunts at night, ambushing large, slow herbivores while they sleep. A single pair can consume five thousand times their body weight during a breeding season to feed their ravenous brood. Although this secretive creature is rarely seen, its kills litter the landscape, while its frightening howls remind you that it is never far away.

Firefox 3 was released today, with several nice features that improve some subtle glitches in our layout. Yay!

I’m currently updating our website to use some new technology that I’ve come up with to improve our readers’ experiences: Xomment.

Comments will now be panelized.

Comment preview and response will be done on the same page. No more refreshes needed.

There will also be a bathroom wall hosted on this site, already linked to above.

I’ve made some changes to our custom javascripts and some of our backend code. I’ve also enabled compression of the webpages. Hopefully, things will be more responsive.

Our biggest change was the migration from the Prototype javascript library to the jQuery library. Most of the behavior is the same, although some bugs have been fixed.

Our most noticeable change was replacing the existing spellchecker with a new one: GoogieSpell.

Sometime late this week, I’m going to do some maintenance on the server and this website. I’m going to experiment with enabling compression again. Last time it broke page caching on IE 6. So if you see that this page doesn’t update any next week, then try cleaning out your cache (or use ctlr-r) and see if that fixes the problem. Hopefully, it won’t occur again.

For more information, see what Bora and I have written.

Well Bora and I and our 30+ judges managed to sort through the nearly 500 submissions and find our 53 winners. Some of use used the stairs methods to assign grades and others programed complex random number machines, while a few decided to read the 400+ submissions.

I am happy to announce that Ian Musgrave will represent the Panda’s Thumb again this year in The Open Laboratory with an essay that fuses two excellent articles:

Stuck on you, biological Velcro and the evolution of adaptive immunity

Behe vs Sea Squirts

Let’s congratulate Ian for his contributions to science blogging.

We are at the submission deadline for The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2007, edited by Bora and myself. Go here to submit quality science blog posts from 2007 before the deadline, Thursday, Dec 20^th. Bora has a list of the current submissions, so if you seen any good posts not represented go ahead and submit them.

We are also looking for a good poem and comic to go along with the anthology.

Judging is already underway and it is going to be a tight fit, but I think that we will get the book out before the 2008 Science Blogging Conference.

We are nearing the end of the year and and the submission deadline for The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2007, edited by Bora and myself. Go here to submit quality science blog posts before the deadline ends, Dec 20^th. Bora has a list of the current submissions, so if you seen any good posts not represented go ahead and submit them.

Now comes the hard part. I need 20-25 science bloggers and science blog readers to volunteer to judge the quality of the submissions. You won’t have to read hundreds of entries, just the ones in the categories that you are assigned. I’m planning on using the following categories (subject to change):

Life Science: Biology, Evolution, Health, Medicine, Neuroscience

Physical Science: Physics, Chemistry, Math, Astronomy

Environment: Climate change, Pollution, Sustainability, Green living, Alternative energy, Geoscience

Humanities & Social Science: Anthropology, Sociology, Archaeology, Psychology, History and Philosophy of Science, Ethics, Arts & Culture

Education & Careers: Science education, Teaching, Curricula, Lab Life, Grad School, Funding, Evolution in schools

Politics: Politics, Elections, Government, Public policy, Culture wars, Creationism, Antiscience

Medicine & Health: Public health, Epidemiology, Pharmaceuticals, Health care, Medical training

Technology: Computers, Software, Hardware, Engineering, Consumer Electronics, Fuel and energy technology

So if you are willing to judge a couple of these categories, please send me an email at [Enable javascript to see this email address.] with a short message about why you think you could be a good judge.