Packing for #scio12: plague relief.

Posted on January 1, 2012January 1, 2012 by admin

Happy New Year! As I type this post, only 18 days remain until the official start of ScienceOnline 2012, which means soon it will be time to pack.

What should you be packing for your trip to premiere annual international meeting on science and the Web? In this post and those that follow, I’ll offer some suggestions.

There is something of a tradition of conference-goers being less than healthy at the conference. With a mid-January conference — right in the middle of cold and flu season — this is maybe not so surprising. So take it into account in your packing.

1. Tissues. Sure, if you need to, you can scam T.P. from your hotel room, but blowing your nose in something designed for nose-blowing is a lot more comfortable. You might want to get the more portable “purse-packs,” but those have like eight tissues a piece.

2. Handkerchiefs. These take less room in your carry-on than a box of tissues, are reusable, and can get you through a full day of sniffles pretty well. The downside is that they’re pretty much a single-user item, so you can’t share them with a fellow sniffler.

3. Hand sanitizer. No matter what you’re using to blow your nose, keeping some hand sanitizer handy to kill those surface germs is a good idea.

4. Nasal irrigation system. Mine is a neti pot. Be sure to bring saline packets (and to work out a strategy with the tools available in your hotel room for avoiding brain-eating amoebae). Nasal irrigation isn’t magic, but it can make breathing easier for at least a little while, not to mention keeping things moving so as to discourage secondary infections form taking hold in that yummy thick mucus.

5. Your preferred cold remedy. Whatever you use to relieve symptoms of bad colds or flu, pack some of that. Note that, if you’re flying, gel caps will probably have to fit in your quart baggie of liquids and gels. Also note that remedies containing acetaminophen will exert some wear-and-tear on your liver — something you’ll want to take into account if you’re planning on drinking heavily with your fellow conference goers.

6. Tea bags. If you are stricken by a cold or flu, drinking sufficient fluids is important, and steamy ones may make your ravaged nose feel better. Bringing a flavor of tea that you know you can drink in quantity — even when nothing tastes quite right — will help you take good care of yourself.

Not pictured: A flu shot. Prevention is obviously better than treatment after the fact, so get vaccinated. In her discussion of the SciO11 plague, Maryn McKenna puts it best:

[I]f there is a lesson here, it is one that a gathering of sci-minded folks ought to know already, but may need reinforcing: Before you come to SciO, you should have all your shots up to date, and that includes this year’s flu shot. To ensure protection, you should get that shot no later than the first week of January.

For those keeping score at home, this is the first week of January. Find some room in your schedule and get a flu shot! You’ll be helping yourself and the herd.

#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “An Open History of Science”.

Posted on February 9, 2010February 9, 2010 by admin

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson. John posted the text of his presentation and Eric posted his presentation a la YouTube. I’m going to take this as permission to skip doing a proper recap here. Instead, I’m going to write about the big ideas this session raised for me.
First, I’m struck by how easy it is for those of us who were trained to do science to know very little about where scientific practices come from — especially practices around communicating results and methods to other scientists. Somehow, we either assume it’s always been this way (where “this way” is often the way we were taught to do it), or that the practices were put in place in plenty of time for the scientists of earlier eras who might have needed them, or that the practices that were established as the right ones were so obvious that their adoption was inevitable.
What I’ve gleaned from my coursework and reading in the history of science is that the inevitable usually takes a lot of work (plus some luck).

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging”.

Posted on February 8, 2010February 8, 2010 by admin

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
This was sort of an odd session for me — not so much because of the topics taken up by session leaders Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette, but because of my own sense of ambivalence about a lot of “entertainment” these days.
The session itself had lots of interesting glimpses of the work scientists are doing to help support filmmakers (and television producers, and game designers, and producers of other kinds of entertainment) who want to get the science right in the stories they’re trying to tell. We heard about the efforts of the Science & Entertainment Exchange to connect makers of entertainment with scientists and engineers “to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines”. We saw the Routes website, produced in association with the Wellcome Trust, which included “a set of minigames, a documentary and a murder mystery which explore the fascinating world of genetics.” (In one of those minigames, you get to be the virus and move to the next level by infecting the target proportion of potential carriers — but you get just one sneeze per level to make that happen!) We learned that the drive to add “extras” when movies are released on DVD is creating something like a demand for real science content to complement science fiction.
In other words, it sounded like producers of entertainment were aware that a science-y angle can hold appeal for the audiences they are trying to reach, and were generally enthusiastic about (or at least open to) the idea of drawing on the expertise of actual scientists.
Of course, there were caveats.

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.

Posted on February 3, 2010February 3, 2010 by admin

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey’s article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of these expeditions can run to $18,000 a day.) Rather than pitching the story idea to the New York Times and hitting them with the bill, or covering the cost of the ship time herself, she “crowd-sourced” her participation — that is, she turned to readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit web project that supports freelance journalists, for donations. The pitch she gave when asking for this money described deliverables:

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web”.

Posted on February 3, 2010February 3, 2010 by admin

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist — perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a journalist, marked the people who were “doing journalism”, whatever the medium.

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM”.

Posted on February 1, 2010February 1, 2010 by admin

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders’ approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it’s medicine, but I’m happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities within the STEM galaxy.

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#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “An Open History of Science”.

Posted on January 18, 2010January 18, 2010 by admin

Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-access journals such important topics today.
The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson (@primatediaries).
Here’s the session wiki page.

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#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging”.

Posted on January 18, 2010January 18, 2010 by admin

Session description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we’ll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.
The session was led by Tamara Krinsky (@tamarakrinsky) and Jennifer Ouellette.
Here’s the session wiki page.

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#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.

Posted on January 18, 2010January 18, 2010 by admin

Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance “exciting findings live from the field!” with “highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our labwork might contradict”? And why is the public so interested in the issue of trash in the ocean, anyway?
The session was led by Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), Lindsey Hoshaw (@thegarbagegirl), and Annie Crawley (@AnnieCrawley).
Here’s the session wiki page.

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