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Tomorrow, at the Cold Spring Harbor Personal Genomes Meeting, I will for the first time attempt to “live Tweet” a scientific meeting. CSH’s new media policy is that potential Tweeters must obtain permission from the participants in advance, so, obviously I will comply and only send info from those speakers who have said it’s ok.
So start following ‘virginiahughes’ tomorrow if you want to see my updates. I’ll use the hashtag #CSHL and follow Daniel MacArthur‘s reporting style. And, for those of you who just don’t “get” Twitter, I’ll try to get a Twitter widget so you can see updates from my blog (if I can figure out how to do it…)
As of today, I’ve been blogging (here and at my previous spot, Sequitur) for four years.
Because I started the summer before my writing graduate program, this blog is probably the best reflection I have of my location (from Baltimore to St. Louis to MI to San Diego to Brooklyn), career trajectory (from student to intern to weekend Chinatown tutor to cat-herder to freelance reporter to freelance editor) and the progress of my writing skills (from rambling to slightly less so). Still haven’t kicked the habit, apparently, of over-using parentheses.
Hooray!
Fascinating and somewhat hilarious post from Nieman Journalism Lab showing the top 50 words that Nytimes.com readers clicked on for a definition. Yes, swine really did make the list, as did other scientific/medical words, including pandemic, bonobo, adenoidal, phlogiston, and paroxysm):
If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.
As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.
(Hat tip: Dale)
Dan MacArthur is a fantastic genetics reporter. The thing is, he’s not a reporter, he’s a blogger. And that distinction recently got him into a bit of trouble.
In early May, MacArthur live-blogged and Twittered (Tweeted?) findings presented at a scientific conference at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. He was allowed to do so because, unlike the bona fide journalists in the room, Dan had not agreed to get permission from a speaker before writing about their presentations. This (quite understandably) made said journalists a bit crabby: GenomeWeb officially complained, and the Lab responded by changing its media policy to include bloggers:
Last week, NPR‘s Brian Unger recorded a hilarious mock-piece about the uselessness of Twitter — the ‘microblogging’ site on which people can continuously inform their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and complete strangers of whatever they wish at any given moment, as long as they do it using fewer than 140 characters. (A representative selection from my current Twitter feed: “At the Austin airport”; “Girl scout cookies have arrived!”; “the science minister of canada is a creationist”.)
It’s easy to make fun of Twitter, and difficult to understand why it’s become such a phenomenon. But apparently somebody’s figured out how to do something useful with it! Hooray!
In early February, frustrated with how few journalists were covering the escalating violence in Madagascar, a 31-year-old medical research assistant from Indiana named Lova Rakotomalala began Twittering translated reports about the crisis. Here’s the full story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (which got me thinking, once again, about how quickly new media is changing journalism):
Back in October, I wrote about why it’s good, these days, to be a freelancer: print media is dying and consequently trimming many of its staff writing jobs (especially those for science writers).
Echoing this is the latest ‘State of the News Media’ report, released yesterday by the Pew Research Center. It’s worth browsing the entire thing, but I’ll just call your attention to one of the ‘major trends’ identified by the report: “Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions“:
The trend is still forming and its potential is uncertain but the signs are clear. Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites. Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines. It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.
Thank you, John Tierney, for brightening my afternoon:
From yesterday’s Tierney Lab:
With music and lyrics by Tyler Kay, it was released by Bio-Rad Laboratories and performed in the above video by singers calling themselves Scientists for Better PCR. The song honors Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the method for amplifying tiny bits of DNA that revolutionized genetics and forensics technology.
Happy Darwin Day, people!
For the last few weeks, I and the rest of the seedmagazine.com editorial team have been working hard to put together an awesome ‘Darwin200′ package, which was released this morning. One of my favorite items is a 60-second video, produced by artist and writer Claire Evans, showing the evolution of everything on Earth. Go watch it! And once you’re amazed, go look at the rest of the essays, podcasts, and slideshows celebrating the great Charles.
Image by gds, via Flickr.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the work in which Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, unveiled the theory that would change his field forever after.
In honor of the occasion, ecologist and science writer John Whitfield is launching Blogging the Origin, a blog that will delve into the book chapter by chapter. Although Whitfield’s expertise lies in evolutionary biology, he has surprisingly never read On the Origin. So, between today and February 12, Darwin Day, he will tackle, live and for the very first time, each of the book’s 15 chapters.
He explains the project’s purpose in his first post:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science just announced its 2009 Science Dance Contest winners! The challenge: Create a dance that portrays the idea behind your PhD thesis.
My favorite entry was “Hydrodynamic Trail Detection in Marine Organisms,” made by Christin Murphy, who’s expecting to get her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science in 2012. The dance (though it might more accurately be called a circus performance…) showcased the way a seal’s face whiskers or a lobster’s antennae can detect water vibrations that are critical for effective hunting and navigation in the deep sea:
Here’s Murphy’s explanation behind the precise choreography:
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