Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time — so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.)
However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by “Tweeting” my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something sensible about those sessions, I’m going to compile my Tweets for each and put them up as posts — sort of “open notebook” blog post writing.
Let me pause a moment for a few observations on the experience of Tweeting a conference session as opposed to taking notes in my trusty notebook (which is what I usually do).
Category Archives: Conferences
A conference paper I didn’t see coming.
I thought I’d share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it.
The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I’m not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know.
On my way to ScienceOnline’09
Once again, I’m sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline’09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I’m going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on “Online science for kids (and parents)”. I’ll be highlighting a selection of the good content that’s out there already, and I’m hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create new kid-friendly science content. Our wiki page is here, so you can play along at home and join the discussion virtually.
In case you’re wondering why my posting has been relatively light in the days leading up to this conference, well, I seem to have been channeling Dr. Isis.
Challenges of placebo-controlled trials.
Back in November, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh, I heard a really interesting talk by Jeremy Howick of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about the challenges of double-blind trials in medical research. I’m not going to reconstruct his talk here (since it’s his research, not mine), but I wanted to give him the credit for bringing some tantalizing details to my attention before I share them with you here.
Access rare books without being made to wear white cotton gloves.
It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn’t really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from “digital media”. (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
What I’ve learned so far at the PSA.
This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what’s at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:
Data paparazzi.
In a comment on another post, Blatnoi asks for my take on a recent news item in Nature:
An Italian-led research group’s closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.
For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on ‘dark matter’ from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences … but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors publicizing data before publication.
It now seems that some physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org showing representations of PAMELA’s latest findings (M. Cirelli et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3867; 2008, and L. Bergstrom et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3725; 2008). Both have recreated data from photos taken of a PAMELA presentation on 20 August at the Identification of Dark Matter conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
I’d say this is a situation that bears closer examination.
Graduate students: NSF Debating Science program.
I’m passing on information about a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation for graduate students. The program, organized by the University of Montana Center for Ethics, is called Debating Science 2008, and here’s how it’s described on the announcement:
A few thoughs on conferences.
It’s been pretty quiet here. Not only have I been engrossed in preparations for the Spring semester (classes start today), but I also went to the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference. So it seems like a good time to ruminate a bit on how conferences fit into the patterns of (my) academic life.
On the slings and arrows of the philosophical job market.
Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the “convention interview” in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates — those who make the “long list” of applicants still in the running for the position — at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there’s some likelihood that the candidates will be interviewing for other positions there as well. I suppose the thought is that with everyone coming to the same place at the same time, there’s an increase in the efficiency of the interviews both for the job candidates and the hiring departments.
Of course, there’s a catch: the Eastern APA always falls around December 26 through December 30.
This holiday scheduling is part of what strikes Elliott as inhumane about APA interviewing. He writes: