Science - Sealed, Delivered.

Spot the Difference

Tue May 26 2009

The question: This lake was divided into two rough equal parts using a plastic divider curtain. The two sides were treated in exactly the same way, with one important difference.

Two questions (answers below the fold):
1) What was the difference?
2) Name that lake. (Bonus pts!)
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ScienceBlogs Has Some Problems…

Mon May 25 2009

And they’re losing bloggers because of it.

For those of you that don’t know SB much, here’s a description, as provided by Wikipedia:

ScienceBlogs is an invitation-only blog network and virtual community. It was created by Seed Media Group in 2006 to enhance the public understanding of science. As of February 2009, ScienceBlogs hosted 75 blogs dedicated to various fields of research. Each blog has its own theme, specialty, and author(s) and is not subject to editorial control. Authors include active scientists working in industry, universities and medical schools as well as college professors, physicians, professional writers, graduate students, and post-docs.

SB is home to some -very- good science blogs and bloggers. And they may just have lost one of their stars. Greg Laden’s Blog has jumped ship (at least for now) because of a ’strange commenting problem’ he describes on one of his last entries on SB:

Something is wrong with my site. Comments appear to be totally screwed up. This situation started on Friday, and I informed Scienceblogs Central of this. Since then I’ve been off the internet, wandering through the wilderness in the Great American Southwest. The tech people are aware of this, but I have not heard any details of when it may be fixed.

Also, trackbacks don’t seem to work well. Or at all. Try for yourself: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/108041 (the trackback for the post linked to above) and you’ll get an error. In fact, as anyone who knows Movable Type can see, the trackback address should probably be http://scienceblogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/108041. That url yields valid trackback responses, but doesn’t seem to work either on most SB blogs (so why suggest trackbacks are on at all, after every entry?).

So commenting, trackbacking… these are backend issues, right? Movable Type issues, maybe related to scaling? Well, maybe, but there are other big problems going on, As Laden has also recently illustrated the advertising on the site is taking a starring role, leaving the content a distant second (Laden also takes issue with the nature of the advertising).

It gets worse too. This is what the homepage of the ScienceBlogs site looks like as I write this in Firefox 3.0 on a 1280×768 monitor:

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Quoted: On Writing About Science

Mon May 25 2009

Good writing is never easy, but writing about science is extraordinarily challenging. Most journalists, whether they’re covering crime, politics, or business, can at least assume a common vocabulary, a certain degree of shared knowledge, on the part of their readers, not to mention their interview subjects. Science writers don’t have that luxury. First they need to understand enough of the subject at hand to ask relevant question. Then they mus mold their interview notes and background reading of sundry science journals into a narrative that a reader will not just understand but enjoy. Not an easy profession.

10 Ideas to Make Your Next Conference Greener

Mon May 25 2009

Conferences are an essential part of the science and engineering worlds. They allow for many important functions (discussion and publication of findings, connections between business and academic circles, forums for emerging issues, workshops) as well as perhaps less noticeable, but equally important personal friendships, handshakes and networking that underlie and underpin many successful professional relationships and have yielded much fruit for those professions.

Unfortunately, as you’ve probably noticed, they can also be very wasteful. This doesn’t necessarily need to be so, and it is surely somewhat ironic that conferences where global issues of policy and environment are discussed leave a footprint as large as they do. With that in mind, I’ve thrown together a few ideas, ranging from simple and readily added options to brand new paradigms, of things to consider when trying to ‘green’ a conference.

1) Lower the Cost to Attendees
Less cost is usually less waste. Not everyone’s conference looks the same, and not everyone goes to the same events, drinks or eats the same thing at the same place, or is interested in the same talks/materials. Be nimble, and don’t charge everyone for things they may not use upfront. The common product should be knowledge.

An emphasis should therefore be placed on making most things optional (either attendee fee or sponsor fee based) since they are de facto anyways. For instance, private networking venues often trump the provided/organized ones anyways. Instead, provide conference networking venues with reasonable food/ drink or cover costs and let the attendee decide where and when to drop their bucks. Throwing attendee money and staff into events that are unattended (sometimes unattendable!) or uninteresting to attendees adds to expense and diminishes their return on investment.

2) Conference Bags
Most conferences hand out conference backpacks, messenger bags, or an equivalent. Most of the time, at many conferences, people bring and are happier using their own bag – because they have less advertising on it, and fit or protect the laptop better. Many attendees just don’t carry a lot of conference materials around with them. Even if I do want the souvenir, I probably don’t want to pack (another) laptop-sized bag into my suitcase, so the things often get left in the hotel room.

Shift this paradigm. Instead, make the conference bags optional, and make them simple cloth bags, which both cost less, fold better and can be more environmentally sound that some other materials. Encourage attendees to bring their laptop bag.
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Ray Anderson: Why Sustainability Makes Business Sense

Sun May 24 2009