At the upcoming North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008, I’ll be leading a discussion on the ethics of science blogging (not about blogging about ethics in science). If you attend the conference (and if you’re not sucked in by one of the other attractive discussions scheduled for the same time-slot), you’ll be able to take part in the conversation in real time.
But even if you won’t be able to come to North Carolina for the conference, you can help set the agenda for our discussion by editing the wiki page for the session.
Category Archives: Conferences
Dispatch from SERMACS: surreal moments.
As mentioned before, I’m currently at the Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (or SERMACS if you’re in a hurry) in Greenville, South Carolina. I got in last night, just in time to catch the last 25 minutes or so of Dick Zare’s plenary address on “The Chemistry of Propulsion”.
Where I arrived was when he put up the slide that asked, “Is Global Warming Happening?”
Checking in from ASIS&T 2007: brief comments on our session.
I’m blogging from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This morning, I was part of a session (along with Bora Zivkovic and Jean-Claude Bradley) entitled “Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication”. I thought I’d make a few brief comments about the session while my impressions are still fresh, but I reserve the right to say more later.
Passing thoughts about conference presentations.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium .
I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads?
Murphy’s law of conferences?
Let’s say you’re looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you’re asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it should be do-able.)
SBC 2007 — photographic evidence.
While I’m readjusting to my own time zone (just in time for the start of spring semester — whee!), I thought I’d share some pictures from the Science Blogging Conference. Here, for example, is intrepid conference organizer Bora Zivkovic. He could have sat back and just enjoyed his pre-conference dinner, but instead he stayed busy taking pictures and circulating to greet the conference-goers and find out what was going on with them. Actually, in real life Bora seems a bit more laid-back than he does on his blog. Still, compared to my typical energy level? He could be a hummingbird.
SBC 2007 — questions in the air.
The wifi at the hotel is a little tentative, so I’ll save detailed posting about the Science Blogging Conference until I’m back on the west coast. In the meantime, I wanted to note some of the questions raised in various sessions during the conference:
SBC 2007 — links to slide sources.
I promised the folks who were listening to my talk at the Science Blogging Conference that I’d post the links to the various blog posts whose screenshots I used to illustrate my points. Here they are:
North Carolina Science Blogging Conference 2007 — Friday dinner.
Bora just said, “There are twenty bloggers here. Who’s live blogging the dinner?!”
I guess the answer is: Me.
What are our duties toward crackpots?
At the AAS meeting in Seattle, Rob Knop risked his own well-being to get the details on a poster that was, shall we say, waaaay out of the mainstream. Quoth Rob:
Now, don’t get me wrong. There will be a lot of posters with data or theory that turns out to be wrong, and there are a lot of posters that disagree with each other and debate and dispute the best interpretation of the data. That’s the normal process of science. The nuts here… they think they’re participating in the normal process of science, but they do not understand it well enough to realize that they are just cranks, nothing more. “Closed minded” the will call those like me who write them off, or “stuck in the modern paradigm just like those who dismissed Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein.” Well, no. These folks are off their rocker, and we know it.
Nor is this sort of thing an isolated incident; one of Rob’s commenters points us to this intriguing abstract from an upcoming APS meeting.
I’ve been there. Indeed, I’ve even blogged about it, back in August 2005. Here’s what I wrote: