Oh, Lately it's so Quiet

It's been pretty quiet in these parts lately, but that doesn't mean we aren't busy cooking up science elsewhere. Over at the Stem Cell Network blog I have a few new posts up, mostly about iPS cells, and there are plenty more interesting posts from other bloggers as well.

Elsewhere, there's some interesting food blogging at Casaubon's Book asking "Is the local food movement elitist", as well as at Tomorrow's Table where the author discusses GE crops and sustainability.

Finally, Scicurious and PZ Myers both highlight some science porn: MRIs of women having orgasms.

Hopefully those links will tide people over while I work on some new Bayblab content. It may be quiet around here, but we haven't gone anywhere.

Thinking About Grad School?

Recently, the BANDIT blog had some kind words to say about us. BANDIT (Biological ANthropology Developing Investigators Troop) has lots of good career advice - how to run a meeting, how to review a manuscript, using new media in the classroom, etc. One post, in particular, (and the accompanying guide) is a must-read for people considering graduate school. While the focus is on studying biological anthropology, most of it can be generalized to other fields. It's good advice, and the kind of advice that many people don't get when considering graduate school.

What are you still doing here? Go check it out.

Open Lab 2009

The Open Laboratory 2009 is an anthology of 50 blog posts selected and judged as the best science blogging of the year. This year saw 760 entries, and for the second year in a row I'm proud to have one of my posts, Good Head, deemed worthy for inclusion. The final list of posts can be found here. Many thanks to editor SciCurious, Bora Zivkovic and all of the judges!

Buy This Book

It's finally here - The Open Laboratory 2008 is now available to buy and read. This is an annual collection of the best science writing on blogs, and the Bayblab is proud to be included in this edition - one of 50 essays (one poem, and one cartoon) selected from over 830 entries!

The book can be purchased from lulu.com (also available as pdf) and will be available from other online retailers, such as Amazon, in coming weeks. So head over there and grab a copy for yourself (and maybe one for your favourite blogger!)

Bayblab Makes the Grade

A Blog Around the Clock has just announced the winners of The Open Laboratory 2008. The Open Laboratory is an annual anthology (now in its third year) of "the best science writing on blogs". This year's collection consists of 50 posts from around the blogosphere - whittled down from over 500 nominations - plus science-themed comics and poetry, and a post from the Bayblab made the cut. We join the illustrious company of heavyweight blogs like Bad Astronomy and The Loom as well as several other top notch science blogs.

Check out the full list of posts here.

The book itself will be available soon from Lulu.com in both print and digital versions.

April is National Poetry Month

Well, maybe not in our nation, but it is in the USA. I'm not going to drop any rhymes on you, but I will direct you to The Digital Cuttlefish who elevates science blogging to an art form. Whether it's growing hearts in a jar, the latest PZ Myers story or anonymity in blogging the cuttlefish delivers and always in verse.

Scientist Bloggers Blogging About Science

The recent surge in the number of scientist-bloggers contributing to discussion here at the bayblab has led me to discover a lot of wicked-ass science blogs. Although, as PZ pointed out is his comment here, many of us find it difficult to find the time to write informative science posts on a regular basis, these guys are proving it can be done. Do yourself a favor and check them out:

Mystery Rays Wow. Has to be the best blogging on real science I've ever seen. Enough reference to literature to satisfy the hard-core virologist, interesting and clear enough to appeal to the non-scientist.

Michael Palm HIV Basic Science Blog Totally hard-core HIV science.

Genomicron Fantastic genomics blog and distinctly Canadian perspective on science.

Laelaps, Tetrapodzoology, Deep Sea News These guys are zoologists and/or paleontologists. Which mean they're not only biologists, but they're also scientists. Which means as a biochemist, this is where I go for a reminder of the beauty of evolutionary theory and life in general. These guys make it all fun, interesting and easy to understand (lots of pictures too!!). They do a good bit of blogging on peer-reviewed research as well.

Cognitive Daily As advertised, "A new cognitive psychology article nearly every day". I don't know how they do it, but they do it.

Drug Monkey Lots of real science being thrown around here. More importantly, Drug Monkey has a sense of humor and this blog is damn fun to read.

Life of a Lab Rat Well-written tidbits of insight into laboratory culture.

Henry Some good stuff on human evolution.

CSHL Protocols General science and the latest in molecular biology methodology.

Sorry to the great blogs out there that I missed. Feel free to add your favorite science blogs to the list below.

The state of blogging: part2

We have a confession. You have all been part of an experiment in social engineering and blogging. This has been in the planning for a while now. But let me step back and explain the purpose of our blogging experiment before we analyze the results.

You'll notice that the comments on our site appear right on the main page, that's because we believe that the conversation about science is more interesting than the posts. We believe that through reason and introspection blogging can become a kind of meta-conversation, a way to further knowledge and foster discussion. Recently we've been discussing science blogging a lot in the bay and came to the conclusion that the landscape is in transformation. We also realized that we had many diverging assumptions as to what constituted science blogging, and what role in can play in society. This is led us to wonder about who blogs and who reads blogs. And it turns out to be mostly the same people. This overturns one particular assumption that blogging is a sort of soapbox, a type of lecture with a speaker and many listeners. No, I postulate that blogging is mostly a conversation.

This in turn made us think about who controls the conversation, and I think that increasingly, in the small world of science blogging, ScienceBlog is a dominant figure. What happens when the conversation is dominated by a group of vocal individuals under a collective banner? What happens when the group is a commercial entity? Is independence preserved?

This led us to devise a simple (and unscientific) blogging experiment. We wanted to see how scienceblog can polarise a discussion on the science blogosphere. This of course meant that we would have to capture their/your interest. We decided to ask what science blogging is, and word the post in a controversial way so that it would elicit a response from top bloggers, and more specifically ScienceBlog bloggers.

We then made predictions. Does being part of a group stunt the ability of members to be introspective and question the motives of their own organisation? would any form of criticism stir things up and spread rapidly across Scienceblogs with a uniformed voice. We were also wondering if reasonable scientists would turn into raging commenters spewing ad-hominem attacks. Finally we were wondering if top bloggers would post this story or ignore it, letting the smaller bloggers fight their fight.

Well we learned a lot from this small 24h study about what motivates people to blog, and how bloggers view the role of science blogging.

First of all, out of 33 comments (excluding ours), only 12% resorted to ad-hominem attacks, which shows a good degree of maturity and intellectual integrity.

Two thirds offered criticism of the ideas being expressed, sometimes constructive, sometimes not.

18% showed some kind of introspection, questioning their motives or challenging their assumptions.

Now lets see what happened on other blogs.

10 blogs linked to the story, and interestingly, of those blogs singled out in the post, only Sandwalk put up the post. [edit: so did pharyngula].

4 of the 9 linking blogs were hosted by ScienceBlogs. Of those, 3 were willing to critically examine ScienceBlogs.

1 Blog was created for the sole purpose of testing the idea that focused science blogging about peer-reviewed research in a particular discipline can attract readers.

2 blogs examined in dept what science blogging should be about. And they did an excellent job. Hopefully they won't mind me quoting them:

BPR3 says: "

But if that's the case, then why should there be any attempt to control the content of blogs? Isn't that what ResearchBlogging.org does? I'd submit that there's a critical difference: Bloggers are under no obligation to write posts that meet our guidelines. They are free to submit posts that they believe do meet the guidelines, but they aren't required to. You can sign up for an account at ResearchBlogging.org and never write a post that meets our standards. As long as you don't attempt to get your post aggregated, you can maintain your account indefinitely.

ScienceBloggers are actually required to produce a certain number of posts per week, and ScienceBlogs has the (rarely invoked) right to shut down blogs that don't meet that requirement. But ScienceBlogs has no restrictions on the type of posts its members write, which makes the first requirement less onerous

I think both commercial sites like ScienceBlogs and independent blogs are critical to the online dissemination of science. Independent bloggers are free from the restrictions of a commercial site, but they might not attract as large an audience. A large audience for science blogging is important not only because of the potential for bloggers to make money, but also because of the public service the science blogging represents. If commercial blogs can expand the readership of science on the internet (even if it also increases the number of political/religious rants), isn't that, on the balance, a good thing?"

Omphaloskepsis says:

"Most science bloggers have other commitment apart from blogging. As one person said, the only way the justify blogging is by calling it outreach. And outreach should go beyond the people who would normally read peer reviewed science. Outreach involves reaching out to the people with a casual interest in science. Outreach involves producing content that would be of interest to people who don't normally read about science.

writing about creationists and kooks is important - when scientists say "intelligent design isn't science", the public needs an explanation. And debunking the latest nonsense is valuable. There was a time when people could wait for books to be published or for talk.origins to be updated. But blogging has become the medium of choice. This is even more important for a blogger like Orac - the amount of quackery in medical fields is overwhelming. A site like Translating Autism is great in that it bridges a gap from technical journals to the public, it only gets things halfway there. Orac is another step, but we need more to reach the Oprah crowd."

Thank you for your attention, sorry if I angered anyone, and I hope you continue commenting about the role of science blogging, and the motives of the ScienceBlog corporate entity.

Edit: even though the 24h has passed I decided to include PZ Myer's contribution to the debate. He is after all the 800lb Gorillaphant.

The state of science blogging

Why do we blog about science? For us at the bayblab, it was just an extension to our conversations about science that tended to take place in the "cool" bay of the lab, the only place with a decent sound system. It wasn't initially intended to be public, it was just an efficient way to share stories among us so that we could have some conversation fodder. In fact, back when we started, blogging in general was mostly about personal journals and pictures of pets, and the science blogs were few and far between.

Now there are thousands of blogs dedicated to science, yet only a few are popular. And strangely the popular ones are only loosely related to science. Just take a look at the top 5 science blogs (according to postgenomic):

1 Pharyngula (mostly about creationism)
2 Cognitive Daily (psychology research)
3 Living the Scientific Life (personal journal)
4 Sandwalk (some evolutionary genetics, and creationism)
5 Aetiology (pop science)

Of those only Cognitive daily is consistantly talking about peer-reviewed research. Why is that? Perhaps there is less appeal in discussing recent papers than bashing creationists. But bashing creationists is almost too easy, and not very constructive. It's been said before, you can't reason somebody out of a position in which they didn't reason themselves into. And it worries me because to the lay audience listening to PZ Myers (the 800lb gorilla), it would seem that science's purpose is to attack religion. In fact I suspect the blog gets most of its traffic from creationists. According to technorati, his top tags are "Creationism, godlessness, humor, kooks, politics, religion, weblog, weirdness", so should it really count as a science blog?

If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right, Seed actually pays these bloggers for their posts. And the whole ScienceBlogs thing is a little incestuous, they really like linking to each other, but not so much to the little blogs. I'm afraid gone is the amateur blogger, and in is the professional gonzo science journalist. Might as well read Seed magazine.

Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research Icon

Just so you all are aware that, starting now at least, the bayblab should include the "blogging on peer reviewed research" icon. It's actually a great idea, that I first ran across at sandwalk. The site where this idea is based out of http://bpr3.org/. Check it out for the concept and guidelines for its intented use. Basically this can aggregate blog posts about original research articles. The aggregation system isn't quite up yet as I understand it. However you can use technorati to check out the newest blog posts that use the icon here(I will be checking out this link regularly). To me this is a great idea and I hope it gets implemented by good science blogs, so that means us. Here's hoping that some spamming moron doesn't abuse it somehow.

Bartholomew Cubbins' RNA Comedy

I gotta hand it to BC from Bartholomew Cubbins on RNA for taking science blogging to a new level with his homemade video entries. Not only does he post video reviews of the latest RNA papers, but more importantly he makes videos that will make you laugh. Check out what not to do during your lab meeting presentation, and famous RNA investigator fun to get started. Then read the rest of his blog. Please.

Fair use in science blogging

A recent post on slashdot directed me to this science blog which was threatened by a journal publisher because it reproduced some of the figures of a recent paper on alcohol and anti-oxidants. (On a side note, the article is quite interesting but flawed, suggesting that alcohol makes fruits healthier, even though the paper does not). Fair use does allow the reproduction of copyrighted material for the purpose of criticism if it is fully cited and contains only a portion of the material (ie not the entire paper). considering we routinely add figures from published material here on the Bayblab, I was happy to see it ended well, with apologies from the journal. But this exemplifies why it is good to know your rights, whether it is to criticize a paper or, as we've learned ourselves, a science quack.

Bayblab Pubcast

After a long hiatus, the bayblab podcast comes back with force with a new formula. The recording is live at a pub of our choice with live audience (of exactly one female) as we discuss the topics of organic food, human evolution and stem cells.

1. As we enjoy our industrial GM'ed beer concoctions at a local pub we focus the first part of the discussion on organic foods: what does the organic label mean, is there scientific basis for claims of superior "healthyness" and does readopting ancient farming techniques really benefits mankind.
   
2. In the second segment of the bayblab pubcast we discuss human evolution, modern natural selection pressure, memes and pandemics. Plus can kamel sing my little teapot?
3. Stem cells: Do they exist, or are they just a figment of Rob's imagination?
   

Science blogger a career?

A sure sign any geek can make it on nature.com ;) , some guy named "Bora Zivkovic" was so sick of experiments not working, he quit before writing his thesis and did full-time blogging. He was burnt out and unmotivated (sounds familiar?). Now finally realises blogging is not really a career, begs to be accepted back in a lab while crying himself to sleep every night (he studies circadian rythms). However he got something out of it: he wrote a book about the best writing in science blog in 2006, which fails to mention the bayblab, but probably earned him more than his stipend. From the nature news article: "For almost three years, I didn't write my dissertation. I recently went back to it and read it. Oh my God, how could I write like this? Such dry science-ese! I now write much better. Three years of writing a blog really improves your writing.". My thesis is gona kick ass then.