I recently returned from ScienceOnline, a meeting for journalists, scientists, artists, teachers, and others who discuss (and do!) science on the internet. This was my second time at the conference and, like last year, I came home with a mind full of ideas about effective outreach, open science, and teaching […]
Last year, I crowd-funded my attendance to ScienceOnline2012, an un-conference for people communicating about– and doing– science on the internet. In exchange, I offered to interview one attendee for every $100 I raised. In the lead-up to ScienceOnline2013, I’ll be sharing those interviews. Based on feedback from Twitter, I decided […]
Last month, I spent a couple of days in Oxford with a group of paleoecologists of many nationalities, timescales, and taxonomic foci, as we frantically narrowed down a list of more than nine hundred crowd-sourced questions to fifty. Our mission: to determine the most pressing, five-year-horizon-scanning questions in the field of […]
The subject of retractions has been gaining a lot of steam in the media recently, with several recent studies (outlined nicely in this New York Times article) showing that retractions are on the rise, and misconduct and falsifying data are one of the most common reasons. Yesterday on Twitter, I […]
I often look at the CV’s of researchers whose careers I admire to get a sense of their trajectory, and to build a rough road map of goals and objectives. How many papers do I want to put out in order to be as competitive as possible for a particular […]
Today’s post is by Dr. John W. (Jack) Williams, a paleoecologist and climate scientist in the Geography department at the University of Wisconsin. Jack is the Bryson Professor of Climate, People & Environment, and the Director of the Center for Climatic Research. You can follow him on Twitter as @IceAgeEcologist. Hi everyone. At […]
This post is part of the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival on Imposter Syndrome, hosted by Scicurious over at Neurotic Physiology. When I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I felt like an imposter. I thought that all of my fellow grad students were more together, had more […]
The wonderful folks at BlogHer asked me to write a guest post on Social Darwinism, after President Obama’s speech last week where he evoked the phrase to critique the GOP budget. “Given the long history of racist stereotypes about poverty, and the fact that the public has a lot of misconceptions about […]
I’ve been following a number of scientist-journalist discussions in the last year in various places, including ScienceOnline2012, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter. Increasingly, I’ve come to suspect that there is often a profound lack of understanding of the respective professional cultures of scientists and journalists, which has important relevance to the […]
Today’s post is by guest-blogger Dr. Jenn Marlon, a biogeographer and paleoecologist who studies the history of fire in the American West and across the globe. Dr. Marlon discusses the implications of fire suppression in the west, as explored in a recent paper in PNAS. Fire is fundamental to our […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 