Outreach vs. Education

An angle I had hoped to get to in last week’s broader impacts post, but didn’t have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0: Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists… Continue reading Outreach vs. Education

Ten Years Before the Blog

While future historians will undoubtedly remember August 7th primarily as SteelyKid’s birthday (it would be irresponsible of me to encourage people to go edit the Wikipedia date page accordingly, wouldn’t it?), there was another locally important event on August 7th, some years earlier: August 7th, 2001, saw my first blog post ever, the inaugural post… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog

Poll: Blogging

Last week Doug Natelson noted a drop-off in active physics blogs. This had not gone unnoticed hereabouts, though I couldn’t immediately think of what to say about that. Yesterday, though, former ScienceBlogs wrangler Christopher Mims provided a possible answer: Google+ has destroyed blogging completely. I would’ve liked to find a way to tie all this… Continue reading Poll: Blogging

Get Out the Vote

The voting phase of the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize has begun, and will run through Wednesday this week. Obviously, I voted for myself, but you should feel free to vote for whatever you like. Or just spend a week reading the 87 nominated posts. It’s all good.

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Categorized as Blogs

Neither a Neuroscientist Nor a Statistician

A bunch of people I follow on social media were buzzing about this blog post yesterday, taking Jonah Lerher to task for “getting spun” in researching and writing this column in the Wall Street Journal about this paper on the “wisdom of crowds” effect. The effect in question is a staple of pop psychology these… Continue reading Neither a Neuroscientist Nor a Statistician

Ba-Ba-Ba BAAAA Ba, Ba-Ba-Ba BAA Ba-Ba Ba-Ba Ba (BOM BOM): National Geographic and ScienceBlogs

It’s been in the works for a while, but a couple of days ago the news got out via the usual combination of rumor-mongering and confidentiality-breaking that makes blogdom such a joy to work with (seriously, you want to know why it’s hard to get mainstream media types to take bloggers seriously, or keep bloggers… Continue reading Ba-Ba-Ba BAAAA Ba, Ba-Ba-Ba BAA Ba-Ba Ba-Ba Ba (BOM BOM): National Geographic and ScienceBlogs

Support the National Center for Science Education

I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I’ll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons: 1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts.… Continue reading Support the National Center for Science Education

Biomedicine: The English Literature of the Sciences?

Thursday’s post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.’s really don’t have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer’s post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes: This is something I’ve tried to explain many times to nonscientists: most… Continue reading Biomedicine: The English Literature of the Sciences?