By Steve Pogonowski and Bea Downing Work dramas, late bills, latent childhood trauma: adult life is full of potential for the average person to get stressed and deal with it by ‘comfort eating’. As discussed in a previous post by Callum, labeled ‘Food for thought’ (hence my segued sequel/blatant rip-off title here), there are ongoing…
My lesson for today: Don’t argue with an oceanographer over our responsibility for cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch. Actually, don’t argue with an oceanographer over anything marine-based and also don’t call someone (the inspirational Annie Crawley) an oceanographer who isn’t. I made the mistake of saying that an article in Slate by Nina Shen…
I’m on record as defending PR in the scientific sphere (and featured in Nature’s From the Blogosphere, so it must have touched a nerve somewhere). I maintain that we will continue to require good public relations, perhaps even more so with the looming spectre of swingeing cuts in publicly-funded science. (I’m a little less enamoured…
Science Online 2010 wrapped up on Sunday and, despite its brilliant format, great networking opportunities and overall general coolness of fun and quirky participants, I was left with a dilemma. If anyone can possibly tell me how to wrap up a conference about science, the web, technology and journalism to fit into a Twitter post,…
Ah North Carolina, home to sweet potatoes, Krispy Kremes, Pepsi, the Wright brothers’ first flight, old-time music (whatever that is) and Venus Fly-Traps. And for four days in January, also home to the moderately sized gathering that is the Science Online 2010 conference. Skim over the program here and try to contain your jealousy at…
I’ve mentioned before about the superb efforts of our friend Darlene Cavalier in encouraging non-scientists (and some influential members of US Congress) to actively engage in science, which we gladly endorse. Darlene is working hard on the ScienceforCitizens website, which will be launched next month, but she also found time to be interviewed recently by…
With most of the science media, green movement and world leader attention focused on Copenhagen and climate change right now, it would be remiss of us not to mention a new evaluation which looks at one of numerous papers promising new ways to tackle the greenhouse effect. The reviewer, Robie Macdonald, from the Institute of…
I visited the cavernous confines of Olympia Grand Hall in west London yesterday, totally unprepared for the mammoth event that is the Online Information Conference (#online09 on Twitter). Not sure what I was expecting: maybe a few stands with bored sales reps handing out flyers on data management and XML development (they had some of…
One of our freelancers wrote a great article about a recent review on the f1000 site, so I wanted to reproduce it here: How do scientists decide what to investigate? Often, they choose an area that is in high demand, hoping to get their work into the best journals as soon as possible. But according…
Cameron and Shirley have just published a paper on article level metrics, in our old favourite PLoS Biology. (Aside: why PLoS Biology? I guess no one would have found it in PLoS One…) They make the point that because of the sheer volume of scientific literature (PubMed alone, which covers just a subset of the…
