Monthly Archives: February 2013

Social Media from an Institutional Perspective – Why are we on there?

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PaulaSalgado1-300x225Paula Salgado is a Lecturer in Macromolecular Crystallography at Newcastle University, UK. As a structural biologist, she uses protein X-ray crystallography and structure determination, to allow a deeper and wider understanding of biological processes and biochemical mechanisms. She is particularly interested in proteins involved in disease caused by infectious agents, aiming at providing molecular details of key mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions, relevant for the development of more effective treatments.

Parallel to an active research career, she has always been a strong advocate of communicating science within the scientific community and beyond, to both children and adult audiences and has been involved in many science communication activities. You can follow her on Twitter @pssalgado and find out more at https://www.paulasalgado.org/.

I’ve recently joined the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biosciences, (ICaMB), at Newcastle University, UK. This is a major UK biosciences research institute, with about 300 staff and students, formed in July 2004.  Today, we are launching  ICaMB social media platforms on Facebook, Twitter and our own blog: Inside Cells and Molecules Blog. Continue reading →

Why We Need Science Communication

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Emily Coren is a science illustrator in California. She has a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UC-Santa Cruz that led to a position making transgenic butterflies at SUNY Buffalo. She graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Program in Science Illustration and drew bugs, plants and dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History and developed educational content for Walden Media in Los Angeles. Her goal as a science illustrator has always been to use popular media to make science accessible to people with non-science backgrounds.  Her current project for connecting is WalkaboutEm.com and she can be found on Twitter as @emilycoren.

I’ve attended several meetings this past year and when I talk with other science communicators, there are certain sources that keep coming up in conversation. I’d like to share with you some of the resources that describe and inform the theory and practice of science communication and have helped shape my perception of the work that I do.  I’m amazed at how new this information is to many of my peers in both science and science communication and I hope you will find the references as interesting and helpful as I did. Continue reading →

Am I Making Myself Clear?

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Alan Alda, actor, director, writer, and founding member of the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, has had a lifelong interest in science. He hosted PBS’ Scientific American Frontiers from 1993 to 2005, an experience he has called “the best thing I ever did in front of a camera.” Considering his career – from M*A*S*H and The West Wing on television to an array of notable movie and theater roles – that’s quite an endorsement. After interviewing hundreds of scientists, Mr. Alda became convinced that many researchers have wonderful stories to tell, but some need help in telling them. Mr. Alda has played an active role in the Center for Communicating Science, starting the Flame Challenge last year, and leading workshops that use improvisational theater games to help scientists communicate more directly and personally. He was co-chair of the 2009 World Science Festival in New York City, hosted the 2010 documentary mini-series The Human Spark, and has written a play about the life of Marie Curie.

I probably learned the best lesson about talking in plain words from my youngest grandson. We were on vacation in the Virgin Islands, walking on a path that led to the strangest tree we had ever seen. The trunk was covered with angry looking thorns. I thought, wow, this is a great chance to talk with Matteo about how this tree might have come to look like this. So, we sat on the ground and had a wonderful exchange of ideas about evolution for 45 minutes. He was only 6 or 7, but he was taking in everything I told him.

The next day he was swimming with his cousin and asked her a question about science. She said, “Why don’t you ask your Grandpa about that?” And Matteo said, “I’m not makin’ that mistake again.” Continue reading →

Let’s Find Out What Science Outreach Can Accomplish

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Matt Shipman is a public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic entomology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, where he covered the nexus of science, politics and policy. He blogs about NC State research at The Abstract and over at SciLogs.com on his Communication Breakdown blog. You can follow him on Twitter where he is @ShipLives. 

Many people, including me, will tell you that science outreach is important. This is nothing new. The public lectures of Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday are thought of as crucial elements in the popularization of science in the 19th century, and they are as likely to be remembered for those outreach efforts as they are for their scientific contributions (which were considerable). But here’s the thing – we can’t prove it.

Scientists pride themselves – and rightfully so – on using facts to answer questions, proving or disproving hypotheses in the pursuit of knowledge. So it is somewhat ironic that scientists have not done a very good job of collecting and analyzing evidence to support their outreach efforts.

For the purposes of this guest post, I’m defining “outreach efforts” in fairly sweeping terms: from online chats with classrooms of grade/ high-school students to public events, and from maintaining blogs to working with mainstream news media. And, to be clear, I think science outreach efforts are enormously valuable. But not everyone agrees with me.
Continue reading →

Scientific publishing 2.0: moving the compute to the data rather than moving the data to the computers

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Adrian Giordani has a Masters in Science Communication from Imperial College London, where he was also the Editor-in-Chief of I, Science magazine. He was a science journalist and Interim Editor-in-Chief at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. The publication he worked for, International Science Grid This Week, covers news about science and computing in Europe, the US and Asia Pacific regions. Adrian writes about technology such as supercomputing, grid computing, cloud computing, volunteer computing, networks, big data, software and the science it enables. You can follow him on Twitter.

Today, data-intensive science turns raw data into information and then knowledge. This represents the vision of the late and influential computer scientist, Jim Gray, who divided the evolution of science into four paradigms. One thousand years ago, science was experimental in nature, a few hundred years ago it became theoretical, a few decades ago it moved to a computational discipline, and today it’s data driven. Researchers are reliant on e-science tools to enable collaboration, federation, analysis, and exploration to address the data deluge, currently equal to about 1.2 zettabytes each year. If 11 ounces of coffee equalled one gigabyte, a zettabyte would be the same volume as the Great Wall of China.

So much data is produced that the journal Neuroscience stopped accepting supplementary files along with research manuscripts to enable them to better handle the peer review process. In an attempt to address the challenges presented by so much data, some are combing software, databases and infrastructures to transform the way scientific publishing is done, which has been little changed for centuries. Continue reading →