The week on Nature Network: Friday 21 November
This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
In the light of a recent announcement that Conservative MPs in the UK are to "increase their science awareness", Brian Derby asks some pertinent questions, including why there are so few scientists in politics. "Are scientists uninterested in politics (outside the need to lobby for greater research funding of course) or are the skills required for both occupations so different that crossover never occurs?" He also asks whether scientists are so bad at communicating that politicians ignore what they say; and whether people wishing to go into politics for a career do not think science is an important topic for study.
Simon Buckingham Shum draws attention to ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change, the world’s first global climate collective intelligence event — designed to bring together scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers, and the emerging set of web-based sensemaking tools, to pool and deepen our understanding of the issues and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. The event starts online in January 2009 and culminates in a conference at the National e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, in April 2009. See here for further details.
While on the topic of events, on 2 December there is a free workshop to provide information on the Wellcome Trust's Engaging Science grant schemes, including an overview of the grants programme, the aims and objectives of the awards, and details of the application and review process. As well as finding out how to produce an appropriate grant application, there will be opportunities to exchange ideas and develop partnerships and collaborations. More details at Nature Network events.
One grant catetory is for the arts, which came to mind when viewing Christie Wilcox's favourites from the entries to the 2008 Olympus Bioscapes photo contest, an international competition that honours "the world’s most extraordinary microscope images of life science subjects".
A different kind of visualization is reported by Hilary Spencer, who posts Pawel Szczesny's c.v., shown as a scatter plot in which the y-axis represents time and the x-axis is roughly 'skillset' (ranging from artistic endeavours to scientific ones). A neat way to see at a glance what a job candidate has to offer.
Last week's roundup reported on the interpid task of Matt Brown, to find the most popular science cliche (if that isn't an oxymoron). This week, Matt provides the reckoning - here according to Google, and here, Google Scholar. Check out the lists for your favourites - and for hints about what to eliminate from your own prose.
