Today ScienceBlogs launched a new sponsored blog, Food Frontiers. The sponsor is PepsiCo. Here’s the description of what the blog is going to be about from its inaugural post by Sb overlord Evan Lerner:
Category Archives: Blogospheric science
2010 blog-reader census.
DrugMonkey’s Google calendar must have told him that it’s time for the meme in which bloggers ask their readers what they’re doing here, a meme whose originator is the esteemed Ed Yong.
Having played along myself in 2008 and 2009, I’m on-board to mount the 2010 version of this blog-reader census. Please respond to at least some of these questions in the comments so we can avoid the expense of sending people with clipboards to your front door:
Drag your lazy ass back to the lab! Don’t you know postdocs are a dime a dozen?
Via Abi, I learn that Chemistry Blog has posted an interesting letter from a PI to his postdoc dated July 27, 1996. The letter, on official Caltech Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering letterhead, suggests that not all the stories one hears about the unreasonable work hours demanded of postdocs are exaggerated. Indeed, the most surprising thing about the letter is that it puts the PI’s expectations in writing.
The letter reads:
IGERT meeting: the Digital Science panel.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like “get out of the silos” and “think outside the box”, my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
If search strings were writing assignments …
From time to time I have a look at the search strings that have brought readers to this blog. Looking at some of the recent queries, I can’t help but wonder what kind of blog this would be if these described my main focus:
The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.
In the midst of the ongoing conversation about managing career and housework and who knows what else (happening here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and likely some places I’ve missed), ScientistMother wondered about one of the blogospheric voices that wasn’t taking an active role in the discussion. She mused in a comment at Isis’s blog:
Do we ever get a post from DrugMonkey about how he does it? He has kids and a wife (who I think is a scientist) but he rarely talks about balance issues. I’m sure its been an issue. Until the MEN start talking about its not going to change.
When DrugMonkey demurred, she followed up with a post at her own blog:
You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.
In the discussion in the comments following her post, ScientistMother quotes from the post from the DrugMonkey vault she has in mind:
Friday frivolity: what’s that in my office?
This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally — I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office.
For example:
Question for the hivemind: where in the blogosphere do you find mentoring?
Yesterday in my “Ethics in Science” class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn’t available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
Recent search strings to ponder.
Our online world is searchable, but it seems likely than not all of our searches are destined to be fruitful.
Here are some searches that have recently brought people to this blog:
What’s the point of peer review?
Once again, I’m going to “get meta” on that recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication I mentioned in my last post. Here, the larger question I’d like to consider is how peer review — the back and forth between authors and reviewers, mediated (and perhaps even refereed by) journal editors — does, could, and perhaps should play out.
Prefacing his post about the paper, Bora writes:
First, let me get the Conflict Of Interest out of the way. I am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication. I helped the journal find reviewers for this particular manuscript. And I have reviewed it myself. Wanting to see this journal be the best it can be, I was somewhat dismayed that the paper was published despite not being revised in any way that reflects a response to any of my criticisms I voiced in my review.
Bora’s post, in other words, drew heavily on comments he wrote for the author of the paper to consider (and, presumably, to take into account in her revision of the manuscript) before it was published.
Since, as it turns out, the author didn’t make revisions addressing Bora’s criticisms that ended up in the published version of the paper, Bora went ahead and made those criticisms part of the (now public) discussion of the published paper. He still endorses those criticisms, so he chooses to share them with the larger audience the paper has now that it has been published.