Liz Neeley and I discussed this in our 2014 paper.

In terms of social media outreach, or outreach in general, the impact on a scientist’s career remains largely unquantified and quite possibly indirect. “Many faculty members identified their primary job responsibilities as research and post-secondary teaching. They felt that outreach participation hindered their ability to fulfill those responsibilities and might be an ineffective use of their skills and time, and that it was not a valid use of their research funding”. In the survey by Ecklund et al., 31% of scientists felt that research university systems value research productivity, as indexed by grants and published papers, over everything else, including outreach. With this prioritization structure in place outreach may be perceived as unrelated to a scientist’s academic pursuits.

Perhaps because of both the ease of quantification and the impact is hypothesized to be direct, one specific question continues to generate considerable attention.   If a paper receives a significant number of social media mentions does it also receive a significant number of citations? If this correlation exist then this would support an argument that Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. about your scientific papers. This science communication would increase the exposure of your paper, including to scientists, eventually leading to more citations of that paper.  In this were true the impact of science communication would be direct and impact a metric that is used to evaluate scientists.

One of the largest studies on this topic, in analysis of 1.4 million documents published in PubMed and Web of Science published from 2010 to 2012, Haustein et al. found no correlation between a paper or a journals citation count and Twitter mentions.  However, multiple studies since do find a link between Tweets and citations rates including the papers of Peoples et al. and de Winter.

A new paper by Finch et al.  finds a link between social media mentions an citations also exists in the orthinology literature.  The authors set up the question nicely in the introduction

Weak positive correlations between social media mentions and future citations [5,8–10] suggest that online activity may anticipate or drive the traditional measure of scholarly ‘impact’. Online activity also promotes engagement with academic research, scholarly or otherwise, increasing article views and PDF downloads of PLoS ONE articles, for example [11,12]. Thus, altmetrics, and the online activity they represent, have the potential to complement, pre-empt and boost future citation rates, and are increasingly used by institutions and funders to measure the attention garnered by the research they support [13].

The findings? For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, the group found that an increase in social media mentions, as indexed by the Altmetric Score, from 1 to 20 resulted in 112% increase in citation count from 2.6 to 5.5 citations per article.

So drop what you’re doing and start Tweeting about your most recent paper RIGHT NOW! 

But wait…

All of these studies show a correlation and not causation.  Simply put, scientific papers with a lot of social media mentions also have lots of citations.  One hypothesis would be that communicating your science broadly increases its exposure and increases the probability of citation.  And it appears that often those advocating for science communication repeat this narrative despite there currently being no support for this hypothesis.  Why is there no support?

Because the correlation between social media mentions and citations could be equally explained by other hypotheses.

So an equally likely explanation for this correlation is that papers that are popular garner both numerous social media mentions and eventually numerous citations.

Tom Webb also makes an outstanding point about the authors of such studies.

The authors of this most recent study note this overall causation and correlation dilemma as well.

Instead, our results suggest that altmetrics might provide an initial and immediate indicator of a research article’s future scholarly impact, particularly for articles published in more specialist journals…The correlative nature of this and other studies makes it difficult to establish any causal relationship between online activity and future citations

So what now?  First stop arguing, as many did on Twitter today (examples here), that Tweeting about your paper is good thing because it will ultimately generate more citations.  The jury is still out on this and will be until a study specifically is designed to test for the causation and not the correlation.

The post Will Tweeting About Your Research Paper Get You More Citations? Meh. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On December 1st, the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology approvingly tweeted a link to a Breitbart piece claiming El Niño, as opposed to climate change, is to blame for the run of record high temperatures observed in 2015/2016.

Their argument appears to be that, because temperatures are now falling as La Niña begins to kick in (and as summer turns to winter in the northern hemisphere where most of the Earth’s land surface is), that we must be settling back into a climate change hiatus (which doesn’t exist – more on this below). They conclude from this that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity don’t cause climate change.

There are many, many problems with this argument. The main one is that greenhouse gas emissions and naturally occurring climate cycles like El Niño aren’t mutually exclusive possible causes of global warming; rather, they can and do interact and co-occur. In other words, to suggest that global warming must be caused either by El Niño OR greenhouse gas emissions is a false dichotomy.

Another problem is that the Breitbart piece cites this Daily Mail piece as its source, which in turn cites a NASA study: “…on its website home page yesterday, Nasa featured a new study which said there was a hiatus in global warming before the recent El Nino, and discussed why this was so.” The Daily Mail didn’t provide a link to the study, so I went to NASA’s website and found the study. Here’s the problem: the study does not say what the Daily Mail says it does. The study provides strong evidence that the observed slowdown in surface warming was not evidence of a “hiatus”; rather, the heat was redistributed in the ocean. Overall, global warming has not slowed or paused. There is no hiatus.

In summary, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology shared and agreed with a piece on Breitbart (a conservative, white supremacist platform to which the chairman of the Committee is a regular contributor, claiming that a recent temperature drop proves climate change is not caused by human activity, citing the Daily Mail (a conservative British tabloid known for its racist, homophobic, and anti-science tendencies) which misreported the results of a NASA study.

If you agree that the Committee should be listening directly to NASA, and not conservative tabloids who dishonestly twist NASA’s science to support their anti-science politics, you can call the Committee at (202) 225-6371. Ask them to retract the tweet, issue an apology, sever its chairman’s connection to Breitbart, and get their information about climate change directly from NASA and other unbiased government agencies. If your Representative is a member of the committee, you can call them too.

The post An Alarming Tweet From the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now lets schedule some Tweets! You can do this through Twitter but honestly Twitter does not make this easy. It requires multiple steps. I prefer using Tweetdeck. Clicking the Tweet composing button brings up an option for scheduling the Tweet.

Some other tools for scheduling Tweets are also available (see this post also).  I also really like Twuffer for its easy display and ease of use.

Choose a time a minute or so past the start of your talk for your first Tweet. You may opt to schedule them to start later if you feel the culture of the conference is for talks to start several minutes past time. Schedule Tweets to hit one per minute apart form each other. Protip: Make sure the computer in which you schedule your Tweets from is set to the same time zone as the conference. Yeah I’ve made this mistake…in the last week…at my latest conference.

Load your presentation to SlideShare (You can see my presentations here). The first Tweet you schedule should be a link your entire presentation. This will make it easy for people to find figures and statements they may miss. Protip: Alternatively, you can go with figshare, which will give your presentation a DOI that can then be cited in papers and other works.

What should you Tweet? Anything related to your talk. Definitely Tweet links to your papers if you are talking about the research within in them. I like to provide a link to a downloadable PDF. However, indicate the link is a PDF so others are not caught by surprise by a downloading file.

Also Tweet any images you want disseminated, main points, links to relevant papers, and figures. Also Tweet a thanks to coauthors and acknowledgements. Protip: Make sure to use their Twitter handles. They can RT and help promote the talk to their networks. Make sure to use the conference hashtag!  Yeah I’ve messed up this one by using the wrong hashtag. Another Protip: Bonus points if you make your own hashtag so people can see all of your schedule Tweets.

Protip: Do not schedule too many Tweets. You need to find a balance between getting relevant information out and overwhelming the conference hashtag. As a general rule, do not schedule more Tweets than slides in your presentation. For a 12-15 talk plan on 10 or so Tweets. For a longer talk 30-60 minutes, plan on no more than 20. Trust me it takes a bit of work to schedule Tweets. You will be burned out by 20 or so.

Now get Tweeting.

The post Become a Social Media Pro User: Tweeting Your Own Talk first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Given this scenario, fellow marine blogger Miriam Goldstein and I are and I pleased to announce the publication of a new perspectives article in PLoS Biology:

Bik HM, Goldstein MC. An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists. PLoS Biology, 11(4):e1001535. 

The idea for this article evolved from conference workshops we ran together (particularly the social media workshop at the Ocean Sciences 2012 Meeting), late night hotel room discussions, and chats with friends, colleagues and our fellow Deeplings (thanks guys!). And the fact that I personally didn’t know what I was doing on the internet for a solid 2 years after I started blogging/tweeting. In fact, a lot of scientists we’ve encountered feel lost and misguided when it comes to social media. Or they want to start blogging/tweeting but have no idea where to begin (grad students and postdocs don’t get much training in this area, and senior PIs don’t usually encourage it).

We hope this article will help you navigate the internet and define your own social media strategy (come on marine scientists, lead the pack!) – please share it with your offline colleagues, and get in touch with any questions or comments!

The post An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists, now in PLoS Biology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Hat tip to Reddit

The post @TheAverageShark only follows one first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When we see images like the above it is hard to believe the ocean inspires us. In one of the most striking examples of our connection to the oceans, if humans, any number of us, live within 200 kilometers of a reef there are effectively no sharks.  This is not the behavior and these are not the actions of a species inspired by the blue around us.

In my favorite view of Earth, centered on the equatorial Pacific Ocean, virtually no land can be seen.  Although cliché to say, we do live on a blue planet.  So we must ask, how could the ocean not inspire us?

The environment influences us in profound ways, an argument so well articulated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steal.  For example, Diamond argued that a plentiful supply of food lead to dense populations that in turn supported a division of labor and more complex societies to form.  Another of my favorite examples, one garnered from working on an undergraduate degree in religion, of environmental influences on humans concerns how different cultures view life after death.  In the Abrahamic religions, originating in arid environments, hell is characterized by extreme heat.  In contrast, among Inuits their equivalent of hell involves extreme cold.

Maybe we are just missing the connections

Perhaps we just need to take pause to truly witness the ways our oceans impact our popular culture.  And when we do so, we realized the evidence is really all around us.

A search of Etsy on my favorite organism, the Giant Squid, returns over 350 handmade items—a potpourri of painted, crocheted, stenciled, etched and sewed items inspired by one of the ocean’s largest denizens.  A search for “ocean” returns well over 140,000 items ranging from starfish shaped soaps to a crafted wooden marlin to iPhone cases featuring the beach.

But it is not just arts and crafts we adorn with images of the ocean.  We decorate our bodies as well.  A search for “ocean tattoo” using Google Image yields 54,000,00 images and searching for “ocean life tattoo” yields 12,700,000.  Whereas not all the images appear to be of actual tattoos, there is no shortage of body ink inspired by the ocean and the life in it.  Nor am I convinced that all these tattoos are from marine biologists or of dolphins (doing a search excluding dolphin still yields 52,600,000).

I believe these examples begin to hint at a society where the ocean consumes our thoughts and activities.  Indeed for many the ocean defines our rest and renewal.  I was inspired to investigate this when friends mentioned mid-month about an upcoming trip to the Bahamas.  It was a trip that makes us all envious–a week of relaxing on the beach.  If you use Google Trends you can see an annual cycle where people begin searching for the term “beach” at the beginning of year, peaking late summer, and diminishing until the end of year when the cycle repeats.  Interestingly, searches for “beach” are even more popular (5x) than “ocean”.  Both are more popular than Googling for “Justin Bieber” (nearly an order of magnitude greater).  On Twitter, the hashtag #beach yielded 792,120 tweets in the past month alone.  Some of my favorites are below.

We also must not forget about internet memes, the way we disseminate information (loosely defined) often humorous and frivolous.  LOL Cats must move over for Sad Shark, Shellfish, and the Intertidal.

And another example exists in high fashion.  We need to look no farther than Versace, Mary Katrantzou, and Stella McCartney ‘s Spring/Summer 2012 collections. As Holly mentioned,  “This season the runways were flooded (ha!) with ocean-themed prints and marine-inspired design.”

When my wife and I recently bought our first house, our first major task was to repaint.  For our bedroom we settled, largely under my urging, on Vintage Map, the color of oceans on charts of yesteryear.  However, there exists a multitude of greens, blues, and even oranges (Ocean Sunset) that are inspired by the beautiful hues of the oceans.  And when choosing the colors for furniture, floor coverings, and other essential decorative elements we can continue to draw on the ocean.  Nudibranchs, provide a wonderful palette of colors to choose from, all coordinated by nature herself.

From Jaws, Abyss, Life Aquatic, and Finding Nemo, there is no shortage of ocean themes enlivening our contemporary cinema.   I am admittedly biased but my favorite movie of the last decade was the Life Aquatic inspired by the films and life of Jacques Cousteau.  Nothing is more iconic of Cousteau than the red beanie, worn by the characters in Life Aquatic, and now countless others seeking to connect to the ocean legacy of Cousteau.

Although these examples are focused on pop culture and may seem whimsical and fleeting, they are reflective of a very deep seeded connection to the ocean, one that runs the course of history both as a nation and a species.

And thus we are left with a remaining question…

Why can we not turn this deep seeded connection to the ocean into more successful ocean conservation and stewardship?

The post Making The Connection: The Oceans In Contemporary American Culture first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now, I’m not talking about any genetic versus environmental components here.  That’s not what this is about. Somehow there became a “norm” of being in science. Likely a stereotype perpetuated by Hollywood. I refuse to believe it is a holdover from the “good ole days” of science when it was a gentlemen’s club. Surely, if we have unique experiences, trials and tribulations that have defined our very being, so did they.

But this chatter is not saved in the archives of history; it wasn’t broadcasted all over the internet, exposed for all the world to see. Our generation(s) are unique in this regard. We share. A lot. Sometimes, too much, but we persist. We crave acceptance, a comfort in knowing that while we might pride ourselves on our unique attributes we are not also alienated by them.

Science has a way of making us disembody ourselves, divorcing personality from career. But this is that strange “norm” we’ve been beaten over the head with creeping up on us again. Why did we do this to ourselves? The aspects of our mentors we are most surprised at discovering often tend to be personality quirks. My advisor has a hobby?? Plays in a band?? My tenured genetics professor FAILED genetics when they were in college??

Preposterous as it may seem, everyone – even in science – is pretty unique. We of the generations X and Y just talk about it. In fact, the distinguishing characteristic between those scientists online and those offline is our unfathomable ability to not shut up. Somehow, we tend to be just as productive on average. Individual mileage may vary.

So I became interested in these personal stories of people’s rise to a career in science because I wanted to define “traditional” careers. My view of a traditional rise to a career in science involves going to college right after high school, do well and get accepted in a graduate school, do research and graduate, 1-3 postdocs, obtain satisfying job in academia or other research institute.

What I found instead was amazing and eye-opening. To quote a favorite song of mine from Reckless Kelly, “My first love was an angry painful song. I wanted one so bad I went and did everything wrong. A lesson in reality would come before too long. My first love was an angry, painful song.” It’s a song I actually play out live because I identify with it. Yes, that’s right. I play live guitar at a local pub when I can find the time. In fact, I’ve played live for years in a variety of bands since 6^th grade. I even went to a vocational school and got a diploma in audio engineering, interning at a recording studio in Oakland, CA.  I was laid off during the recording of Green Day’s Warning.

Science was never in my cards. I was bored in high school. It took too long and I could be doing drugs, hitting on girls, practicing songs with my band, creating mischief around town (I don’t think the city ever found their manhole covers…), or any number of things that was NOT school-related. I took the minimum requirements and never once thought about going to college. That was for dorks and preppies, and it cost a lot of money. No. I was certainly destined for rockstardom. How hard could it be, right?

Eventually, I was worn out, laid-off, and in a strange Californian city far from my Iowan roots with no friends, no money, no clue what to do except cook. And I cooked for many years: Frank’s Pizzeria, Applebees, Panera, smoky hole in the wall pubs, upscale delis. I baked for a German castle lodge and was a chef apprentice at a 4 star dining club. My life was a wreck, I kept moving jobs to whoever would pay me a quarter more per hour than the last job. All this didn’t help the drug situation, amphetamines are cook’s best friends, after all.

Having nothing and no one to lean on, I started spending all my time trying to connect with some shred of humanity online. I’d stay up all night just getting shit-faced drunk and hang out with my friends – who existed as clever pseudonyms and cartoonish avatars on my monitor screen. I hung out in an online “pub” on the once popular 6 degrees website during the late 1990s. It was just a chatroom started by some dude, probably just as lonely as confused as I was, but it drew a steady and loyal following. I got to know the participants as if they were my old high school buddies from just a couple years back. Even met a few in person while I was living out of my car bumming around the US and Canada.

One user stood out though, a girl from Sweden. Eventually we chatted on the phone, taking turns calling each other to share the long distance fees. Neither of us were happy in our lives and I somehow convinced her to come over to the US. She saved up money, even working overtime through the millenium New Year’s, bought a plane ticket and headed to San Francisco. I was living across the bay in Berkeley at the time, or as a I called it “Bezerkley”. We fell in love, she overstayed her visa and we eventually got married and 12 years later here we are still madly in love with 2 cute, screechy little horrors running around our knees.

My wife saved my life. I was asking for it, but too proud to ask directly. She believed in me and somehow I found myself enrolled in Vista Community College in Berkeley, CA, later Monterey Peninsula College after leaving Berkeley to get away from the crazy people. With renewed focus I found I was very good at math and science and felt pulled into this area, mostly because of my interest in evolution and ecology. This was cemented after transferring to UC – Davis, a truly wonderful place to be for someone who loves evolution and ecology.

The details are left out from my teenage years and my 20s. Nights spent crying because I felt like a complete failure in life, nights spent on speed, nights spent stoned or drunk, nights spent wondering which store I’m going to steal food, booze and cigarettes from (Always 4pm at one of the gas stations nearby while they did the shift change). I lived off my credit card for months cause I didn’t know what to do. I was crushed I couldn’t work in the music industry and hated having to cook for a living. I just didn’t know how to piece my life together.

Even after the dust settled and I was in a stable relationship and had committed to college, I had no clue how to live life. How to “succeed”?? At each step, I never seemed to comprehend what the next steps were. Graduate school was just as painful, and really an entire post in its own, I get very bitter just thinking about it. But at least during that time I was drug-free, had a caring wife and to my kids I was always a “success”.

As much as I like to think so, my situation was not unique. The details surely are. I hope no one has to go through the self-inflicted emotional torment and turmoil that I endured. But we are all confused and struggle, and the lesson is that we don’t have to do it alone. And it is so hard to tell people this. Especially people who don’t know they are struggling. They aren’t used to it. They’ve emerged from their cocoon and are now a newly hatched butterfly finding their footing facing a murder of hungry crows.

When you’ve been through hell, you can recognize what struggle looks like in other people. It’s painful to watch. I’m watching a friend struggle with his PhD and lab experience right now and won’t talk to anyone about it. He has the “just plow through and get it done” attitude. That’s nice, but it’s not human, and frankly, it won’t work. Yet, this inhuman sort of mind-set is what is drilled into us. It’s revered, respected and part of this mythical “norm”. Science is meant to be soulless, emotionally exempt – yet, we are supposed to all be excited we are doing SCIENCE!

It’s all very confusing and we shouldn’t do it alone.

One of the great things social media has done for the human condition is to aggregate like-minded people. I had the extreme fortune of spending half of last week in Raleigh with the most wonderful 450 people that could ever be assembled in one place – Science Online. One of several unifying characteristics of this group is their love for being social online. This has fostered amazing, productive interactions among people and provided a welcoming atmosphere that tends to be infectious.

Feeling inspired last night after witnessing a disheartening exchange about gender roles – a constant, but important, topic – I made a series of open observations. One thing we do poorly is recognizing diversity of personal experiences and how that shaped who we are at this moment. It is all too easy to lump “scientists” into a group that should conform to the aforementioned mythical “norm”. That’s the easy way out and it negates a long chain of events that led up to who we are today.

Had I not experienced a world of drugs, failure, loneliness and utter confusion I might never have been led to participate strongly online and I might never have met the woman of my dreams who I owe everything I’ve managed to achieve today, and I might never have had this beautiful family that I’ve treasured more than anything, such that a life in academia would interfere so much that 16 hour days would be deemed unacceptable to me. It was this decision that to led to my interest in science communications and evangelism, which led me to use social media and meet this amazing group of dedicated scientists and communicators who wish to be the change they want to see in the culture of science.

The keynote speaker of Science Online, Mireya Mayor, told a similar story. The details are very different, but the lesson is the same. A series of events and emotions and experiences that shaped what she became. Her talk was a case study in how different our lives can be while the end goal can still be similar – doing good science. The overarching lesson was reiterated during Janet Stemwedel’s storytelling about her daughter – “the pretty pink princess” – who was unimpressed with gender-coded science kits for girls. This lesson was that we can still be ourselves and be successful in science. It didn’t matter if you were a cheerleader, a pink princess, or a hairy-legged feminist. Each can do science and has the potential to do it well.

This is when the realization hit me that we all have amazing stories that we bottle up inside us. Perhaps we are embarrassed about them or just think no one cares. So I started the twitter hashtag #IamScience and implored my twitter friends to tweet their “nontraditional” experiences. The response was overwhelming. I’ve included a storify of all the responses below. I’ve read every single one and am truly humbled to be in the wake of such amazing individuals who have overcome so much to be where they are today.

It really hit home for me, though, when @katyannc tweeted: “I’m about to cry reading the #IAmScience tweets. Having a hard time making it out of undergrad and suddenly I don’t feel so alone.” This is why we needed this. Maybe one of us can save someone else’s life because they suddenly don’t feel so alone anymore. That, yes, we can have strange, difficult experiences. We know they affect us, but can’t quite put into words how. The just become part of the thread of our being, a memory or a lesson learned.

I want you to read these. Do you identify with the tweeters? Does it humanize the experience of being part of a culture of science? Where do we go next? I don’t want anyone to feel alone in their ascent through science. To this end I would like to curate a free e-book of submissions from people about their experiences – good and bad, whatever you are willing to share. Put your name on it or keep it anonymous, doesn’t matter, but people need to hear how your experiences in the past shaped who you are today and what you do.

If you are interested in participating in this project, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Submissions are whatever is necessary for you to tell your story, up to 5000 words. Include drawing, sketchpads, poetry, whatever you need to tell your story.

UPDATE: The response has been extremely overwhelming, many personal #IamScience stories are appearing on blogs and the twitter stream hasn’t ended! I’ve aggregated the representative tweets and all the blog posts and personal stories about science at the I AM SCIENCE tumblr. Please follow along and check back there often!

The post #IamScience: Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

<whistles>

Done?  OK, so in essence, Bhattacharya’s argument seems to be that it’s OK for scientists to check their quotes intended for an article about their work to make sure they were accurately reproduced, but they have no copy check rights beyond that.  My specific issue is that he’s asking scientists to take a leap of faith that between their quote to the journalist and the news stand, the journalist will not distort, misrepresent or otherwise change the meaning of what was said by way of the surrounding copy.  The problem is, by then it’s too late to do anything about it.  I am just one of the many scientists who at one point or another have been burned by a case of misrepresentation in the press.  But it’s not like Bhattacharya is saying “its OK, trust us, we’ll get it right”, he seems to be saying “never you mind what we do with your quote, that’s our business”. 

“Reporters will give the story an angle that has their reader firmly in mind. The reader is not a scientist’s first concern. “

I read this to mean that the journalist writes for the reader, and is entitled to change the way the material is presented to do so. the phrase “give the story an angle” specifically implies that objectivity may be trumped by a context that may be more appealing to the reader; in other words, style over substance.  This idea is anathema to a scientific community that has a hard enough time explaining the arcane nature of their work, without the issue being clouded by somebody else’s “angle”.  I also object to the idea that the reader is not the scientist’s first concern.  If that were the case, we wouldn’t care what you did with our quotes!  Its precisely because we care what the reader thinks that we go to such efforts to ensure that our work is properly represented.  He goes on:

“As a result, researchers can often suggest changes that would flatten the tone, or introduce caveats and detail that would only matter to another specialist in their own field of research.”

Flatten the tone?  That sounds to me like a scientist reining in sensationalistic writing.  As for introducing ceveats and details, that’s where the proverbial devil lives much of the time.  What might seem like a tiny sin of omission to a journalist might be a really big deal to a scientist.  The worst the journalist could be accused of is hyperbole, whereas the scientist might find themselves in hot water or an argument over priority or authority in the science community.  Just look how easily harmless scientific words were twisted (albeit with polotical motives) during the climate-gate email scandal.

Which brings me to the Twitter conversation.  I chimed in after the omnipresent Bora Zivcovik retweeted Martin Robbins’ (also of the Guardian) tweet regarding the story (@Ananyo is Bhattacharya ):

My comment http://lay.si/ke RT @Ananyo: Scientists should not be allowed to copy-check stories about their work http://lay.si/kd

I replied:

What a poor argument. “Flatten the tone” = “reduce sensationalism” & “Introduce details” = “ensure accuracy”! @mjrobbins @Ananyo @BoraZ

Bhattacharya :

@para_sight problem is you guys are not good judges of readability.  and then @para_sight and to be fair, why shld u be? It’s not your job.

Me:

@Ananyo What use readbility without factual accuracy? and then  @Ananyo Aside from which, your statement about judging readability is a mildly insulting gross generalisation

Skipping forward a bit, he says:

@para_sight it’s not about communicating the details of scientist x’s research. our objective is different.

which really raised my eyebrows:

@Ananyo Did I just read you right that a science journalists job is NOT communicating scienctists research??

and he replies:

YES YOU DID RT @para_sight: @Ananyo Did I just read you right that a science journalists job is NOT communicating scienctists research??

@para_sight guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2… here’s what o think it’s for

So I go check out this other piece to see if I can better understand where he’s coming from.  It’s not exactly on point with the conversation, seemingly being more directed at fellow journalists with respect to the Bristish science writing awards, but towards the end it gets better, and I’m still confused:

“Now, we all love Brian Cox and a certain amount of good science journalism might be cheerleading for the fascinating or baffling work of scientists. But I believe the best stories, and those that are often poorly represented in the ABSW awards, come from the troubled hinterland where science meets politics and big business”

It sounds like he draws a fairly bright line between communicating the contents of new scientific research to the public and a sort of “real journalism”: looking for conflict or drama where science butts up against other spheres of endeavour (interesting that religion was left out).  And here’s where we get to the differing perceptions of scientists and journalists, because I’m pretty sure if you ask most scientists what science journalism is for they’ll say it’s to translate the difficult science they do for the eyes and minds of the public through a skilled journalist’s mastery of language and writing.

 Not surprisingly, Robbins takes Bhattacharya side:

@Ananyo @para_sight Communicating scientists’ research isn’t journalism, it’s PR.

OK, that’s another view point I can’t agree with.  Science communication should be agnostic about all things except enthusiasm.  PR is lots of things, some of them are even good, but agnostic it ain’t!

Ed Yong, whom I respect tremendously, is closer to the middle ground:

@para_sight @Ananyo is right. Sci journalism and sci-comms are different. Overlapping but different.  After I then said that Bhattacharya and I were on different planets, he replied:  @Ananyo @para_sight You’re only on diff planets in that one of you is focusing on good journos/bad scientists; the other on the opposite.

He’s probably right, but even so it means that the perception gulf exists nonetheless.  In that case, perhaps rather than worrying about whether or not scientists should have rights to check articles before they get published, we should focus our energies on a better mutual understanding between scientists and journalists about what our respective goals are, because that’s a much more worrisome and potential damaging problem.  Bhattacharya and I agree on at least one thing, so I’ll give him the last word on that:

@para_sight journalists are from venus, scientists are from mars? but you’re right. journalism or news writing is not a simple affair….

The post Getting on the same page with Science Journalists first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Here is some video close to the center of the hurricane in New Bern, NC, 30 minutes from my front door. Thankfully, the good Dr. M of this very blog took me in Durham, NC, with my wife, 2 kids and dog. We were joined by Andrew and Amy of Southern Fried Science, our friend Luke and Amy’s 2 goats. So it was quite a madhouse with us all under one roof! But as I said before, this wasn’t a storm to be messed with! Irene made landfall where I live in Beaufort to the Outer Banks, the latter of which had some tremendous damage from the wave action and raining. See this video courtesy of Coast Guard News.

We returned on Sunday with no power and LOTS of damage to the yard. Thankfully our house was well intact, only a crack in the window pane, probably not even worth the deductible to repair. Power returned 9:30 pm on Sunday, which I would like to thank Carteret-Craven Electric Coop for their prompt attention and readiness for the storm. Unfortunately, was just a little too long for my meats and dairy to survive (hurricane casualties!) – try a little harder next time guys!

Luckily my wife is a photographer so we got some really good photos of the damage in the area, to our house and what Andrew and I lovingly refer to as Failboat Bay. It best viewed as a slideshow over at her webpage, direct link here. Here is my favorite picture from Failboat Bay though the best stuff is at Linda’s slideshow.

So we consider ourselves lucky that our roof was undamaged, there are several ominous oaks and tall pines hovering over our house! None impaled it though. I am disappointed though about the conversation going on media hype about the storm. This was a bad storm, no doubt about it! I summed up my feelings about it in a few tweets this morning with feedback from my tweeps @sfriedscientist, @snailseyeview and @spinydag among others:

Many people gave me and my family kind thoughts on facebook, emails, twitter, etc. It’s always nice to know so many people care and sorry if I couldn’t respond individually to everyone. Finally, I give you this hilarious Fox News Reporter, hat tip to Greg Laden who dug from Wikipedia: “Where polluted stormwater from rivers or drains discharges to the coast, sea foam formed on adjacent beaches can be polluted with viruses and other contaminants, and may have an unpleasant odour.” Something maybe the reporter or his crew should look up…

Do you have any Hurricane Irene stories? Let me know in the comments!

Reporter Gives Update Covered In Sea Foam: MyFoxNY.com

The post Hurricane Irene first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Add your own thoughts and HAPPY SHARK WEEK!

FROM TWITTER

@OceanShaman: Swimming in #OCEAN all my life…know they are there…very respectful! Consider them beautiful & critical to #Ecosystem!

@Hectocotyli: The 1945 4-day shark attack terror on the shipwrecked sailors from the USS Indianapolis http://bit.ly/p9N9wX #sharkweek #DSN

@spinydag: All sharks, from great whites to dogfish, just look like they own the place. And act accordingly. #sharkweek #DSN

@WhySharksMatters: #SharkWeek #DSN Even the smallest #sharks I work with, 8 inch sharpnose pups, aren’t afraid to go after bait bigger than them.

@mickeyjs12: #sharkweek #DSN They are beautiful, graceful and keep our oceans the wonderland they are.

@jtotheizzoe: they are blankly simple and ancient while at the same time highly advanced and dangerous – deadly living fossils #dsn #sharkweek

@missmolamola: #sharkweek #DSN I love sharks’ ability to sense bioelectric fields!

@kwing: #DSN #sharkweek they’re ancient, and one of the last things left on earth that puts us lower on the food chain. Gotta respect that.

@vonOberst: They’re not very tasty. #sharkweek #dsn

@kwing: #DSN Also, wobbegongs. Lying in wait on coral reefs, with camouflage mouths! And whale sharks – giant polkadot filter feeders.

@ejwillingham: Bc they can eat ppl, we’ve been investigating them for yrs, still know so little.Can’t resist human-eating mystery #sharkweek #DSN

@daumari: Fascinated by the Helicoprion fossils found in my area and other bizarre ancient sharks. :3 #sharkweek #DSN

@CatfishStory: Sharks are jawsome! #sharkweek

@AlchemyStress: They are the perfect predator, thank god they can’t fly or walk we’d all be screwed #sharkweek #DSN

@sharky04: I’m fascinated by #sharks b/c I think they are beautiful and graceful animals who have been given a horrible image #sharkweek #dsn

@abqdorid: #sharkweek : it’s WAY to sensational. But sharks themselves are fascinating: ancient, cartilaginous, and so darn misunderstood. #DSN

FROM TUMBLR

1. sixbucks answered: The ampullae of Lorenzini is pretty frickin cool. I wish I had electroreception.
2. neamy answered: So many teeth … row upon row of terrifying teeth. I’m not sure if that’s a reason to love/not love; probably both though ^^
3. bestseasonever answered: Sharks are in James Bond and used as an awesome weapon to attempt to kill him. They just show how he is a BAMF. And also sharks go nahhhhhhh!
4. jmsternberg said: Then I was fascinated with the animal that scared me so much. A couple years later I was in 2nd-3rd grade recording Shark Week on my VHS. I would watch the tapes on repeat so much they broke before the next year’s programs.
5. jmsternberg answered: When I was a kid (about 7?) I watched Jaws and was so scared I had to call my parents crying to come pick me up.
6. enhancethetruth answered: I got my left nipple bitten almost completely off by a shark. It’s all deformed now. No joke.
7. sancosme answered: they haven’t evolved since the time of the dinosaurs, because they are perfect in every way
8. shotgunsunday answered: The shark = ultimate predator, backed by countless years of evolution & abilities that beat anything that modern technology has yet to offer.
9. jtperkin answered: As an ichthyophobic scientist, Shark Week leaves me ambivalent. I’m fascinated most by the adaptive variations.
10. laviesupernova answered: What I love: What awesome predators they are, after over 200+ millions years they still dominate. Not love: How misunderstood they are.
11. adkip answered: their dorsal fins and hardcore breaching skills
12. snager answered: I like sharks because they are often unfairly villainized. (you know, besides being the, like, most highly evolved creature on earth.)
13. huntercolt23 answered: Besides the fact they can smell blood from up a mile away and detect electric magmpnetic pluses in the water? Sile, dentists’ worst nightmare
14. allisonwilliamsmusic answered: I’m thrilled/horrified by how dead their eyes look. Like they’re robots made from cartilage and sandpaper!
15. rambolau answered: I love sharks because they’ve been around for 450 million years. It’s also why I’m scared of those BAMFs!
16. southonfire answered: sharks are adorably scary and cute
17. atmachine answered: the fact that sharks can be immobilized and killed by simply flipping them onto their backs is disappointing. die cooler, bro.
18. karatepop said: Also! Sixgills look like Triassic dinos! So. Cool.
19. karatepop answered: Bluntnose sixgills swim up to shallow water here, despite being deep-sea sharks. Oceanic whitetips have a posse of pilots!
20. apinchofsnuff answered: Sharks are multi-bladed razors wrapped in sandpaper and capable of moving very fast. I try not to think about them too much.
21. physicsgirl answered: Pointy noses, forever amusing!
22. ridethenarwhal answered: I believe our interest in sharks stems from our love for watching hangings under the brittish crown. It’s horrible yet so captivating. :D
23. thelaughingbear answered: groovy shark tooth necklaces and bacon wrapped shark steaks.
24. three-zero answered: The Ampullae of Lorenzini -file under awesome.
25. impossibleeelove answered: awesome: they live in water
26. siverex answered: i think its awesome!!,because has razor sharp teeth and also very fast eating machine.:)
27. sharksystematics answered: Epic immune systems.
28. with-pleasure answered: i love sharks b/c they prevent humans from overpopulating the ocean.
29. simmerdown said: I think they’re far too misunderstood to not care about them. It breaks my heart when someone says something like “all sharks should just die” and mean it. They’re really magnificent creatures that people need to be educated about.
30. ukulelesownall answered: there’s a shark that looks exactly like a ray. Stealth power.
31. discodroid answered: sharks don’t like communists!
32. pointyteeth answered: Sharks are badass, plain and simple.

The post Shark Week: What Is Your Fascination With Sharks? first appeared on Deep Sea News.