Blogs
Jennifer Rohn writes a barnstorming post this week on the under-representation of women scientists in the media (and other spheres):
Where is the female Stephen Hawking, the female David Attenborough, the female Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones, Martin Rees, Brian Cox? Why is nearly every up-and-coming television science presenter (who doesn’t even have to be a practicing scientist) a man? Why does no one seem to care about the opinions of female scientists, or female non-scientists with past science credentials, or think that audiences wouldn’t want to listen to them?
The full post, and comments, are well worth a read. And it’s a topic Ayusman Sen also explores this week.
Acting as a science ambassador, Richard Williams had the daunting task of explaining his role as a computational immunologist to a class of primary school children. Here’s how he tackled it:
you all know what a Sony play station or Nintendo Wii is? Good. Are you familiar with the games that involve you killing the bad guys? Great. Well I make games that have the disease(s) that are making the patients sick acting as the bad guys. My games are the same, and we try and kill these bad guys – once we find out how to kill them, I pass back the information to the scientists in hospitals, so that they can help the doctor try and make the patients better.
Andrew Sun writes a thought-provoking post on the difficulties of translating an English cartoon text into Chinese :
In the course of translation I found the non-chemical parts the most difficult. For example, I had a hard time finding the Chinese equivalents of “d’oh”, “grrr” or “forsooth”, etc.
Elsewhere, we saw a real cavalcade of superb blog posts this week – too many to list in full, but here are a few highlights. Stephen Curry reflects on the somewhat successful Science is Vital campaign, Sohini Mazumdar discusses mentors, Editors Timo Hannay and Stewart Tansley introduce themselves on Fourth Paradigm blog, Tom Webb describes the fish catch of a nuclear power station, Kausik Datta looks at the US mid-term elections and their implications for science funding and Barbara Ferreira contemplates the connections between gaming and science.
And finally…
Eva Amsen comes across an unusually labelled offering in a Toronto surplus store. Find out more here :
