Blogs / The Loom

If you’re a scientist mysteried by the media, AAAS has set up a nice site to help. Included are a series of interviews with members of that dubious profession, including Science Friday’s Ira Flatow talking about radio, and the New York Times’s environment writer Andrew Revkin on newspaper reporting. I talk> about life as a multitasking freelancer, and how blog posts and books are and are not the same.

I’ve been nosing around Facebook and Myspace for a few months now, trying to understand how these kinds of sites will influence the work of writers like myself. No terribly clear answers yet, but some interesting experiments underway. Facebook, for example, used to only have “profiles,” where people could create lists of friends and add various applications. Now they’ve made the site more flexible with “pages,” which can be opened by businesses or–in my case–individuals. The format allows me to create a page that’s a lot more like my own web site. It’s got information on my upcoming talks and my books. I hope to add other things soon, like video of talks, etc. I can send out notifications to people who sign up on the page to let them know what’s new.

So if you are on Facebook, check out the page, sign up if you like, and let me know what you think of it as it evolves.

Sorry about the mistake on the last post’s headline. (Vengeans? Sort of like vengeful vegans?) Spell-checkers have turned my brain to mush.

Last week I groused about having trouble with MySpace, which led others to leave some nasty comments of their own. In the interest of full disclosure, I should now report that I figured out the problem: I was not entering my password correctly. I apologize to the folks at MySpace for blaming them for my own blundering.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that I’m back on MySpace by looking at my page, which is as dull as ever, but that’s just because I haven’t had the time to figure out how to embellish it. (Suggestions welcome!)

Good news–I’ve just won the National Academies 2007 Communication Award. Each year the prize is given out jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Engineering, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in three categories. The category I entered was writing for newspapers, magazines or the Internet. I decided to submit stuff I’ve written for newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Here are the stories I submitted (with links to my blog posts about them):

“A Fin Is A Limb Is A Wing.” National Geographic, November 2006. An article on the evolution of complex features.

“His Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty.” The New York Times 2/7/06. A profile of Mark Siddall, leech hunter.

“Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy.” The New York Times, 3/14/06. Harvard biologist David Haig’s influential theory about how evolutionary conflicts shape the development of children.

“This Can’t Be Love.” The New York Times, 9/5/06. The enduring mystery of sexual cannibalism.

“Devious Butterflies, Full-Throated Frogs, and Other Liars,” The New York Times, 12/26/06. The evolution of deception in animals.

“The Origin of the Ridiculous” The Loom, 8/15/06. How a new fossil illuminates the evolution of whales.

Congratulations to the other winners and finalists–all of whom you can read about on the award web site. [link fixed]

I’m going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science…). Actually, each speaker is staring into a computer camera and talking on the phone to his or her partner in chat. On Saturdays, two of our most provocative science writers, John Horgan and George Johnson, take to the tubes.

Horgan asked me to join him this week. I’ve known Horgan for several geological eras, ever since I was a young fact-checker at Discover, trying to make heads or tails of a story Horgan wrote about how universes can bud off baby universes. He has always had a fondness for the far reaches of science, which led him to write his first book, The End of Science. I found a lot to ponder in the book, but I didn’t buy his central argument–that all the great scientific discoveries are behind us. (For the details, see this review of another book I wrote for the journal Nature.)

That certainly seems like a good place to start our discussion, and we’ve got plenty of other ideas as well. We’re actually recording the piece midday Friday (EST), so if you want to make any requests, we can do our best to bloviate about them.

A while back I mentioned I’ve gotten a Facebook page and a Myspace page. They’ve been fun to toy around with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a harbinger of how we will all trawl for online information in the future. But to those who are asking to be friends at Myspace, leaving messages for me, or just wondeirng why the page is just so lame, I’m sorry to report that I haven’t been able to log in for a few days. If my kids were just a couple years older, I’m sure I’d have all the tech support I needed to deal with this. But for now, or at least until the MySpace minions come to my aid, it’s all about Facebook.

Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn’t automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they’ve experienced at the hands of reporters. Chris Mooney, a reporter, thinks the ranting is all misplaced, and wants us to understand that reporters who write about science are the best trained journalists of all.

I thought I’d join the fray. I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He’s not feeling the genuine pain being expressed in the comments to Tara’s post. These are people who have had lousy experiences with reporters. You don’t have to be a prima donna to come out of the journalistic process feeling queasy. Even as a science writer, I’ve had that queasy feeling. A couple years back I wrote a piece on musical hallucinations. The NY Times headline writer took a little poetic license and dubbed it, “Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod.” I didn’t mind. Most of the story was about how mysterious this condition is, and how little scientists understand about it. But within a couple weeks I saw the story transmogrified by other reporters into stories with unbelievable headlines, such as “iPod users in musical hallucination threat.” There is no ipod hallucination epidemic, of course–just an offhand comment from a scientist that our increased exposure to music in the modern age might increase musical hallucinations–presumably from a very very rare condition to a very rare condition. Ridiculous, and depressing. It’s an example of what some commenters to Chris’s post pointed out–even if you want to claim that science writers can walk on water, a lot of science reporting these days is not done by self-professed science writers.

So, given the not-so-pretty reality, what to do? More thoughts beyond the jump…

(more…)

Whoosh. A year has passed since I got my passport stamped with a scienceblogs.com visa. Thanks to all who have come this way and shared your thoughts. May the next year bring more of life’s surprises.

In about a month I’m heading to Colorado for the “Science and Media Summit” at the Aspen Science Center. The name may conjure up an image in your mind of a long table with diplomats from Science on one side and Media on the other, tensely negotiationg an end to some sort of bloodshed. As I understand it, though, the meeting should be much more amicable and interesting. The subtitle for the meeting is “Getting It Right: Science and the Media in the Emerging Media Landscape.” Our mission will be to come up with a blueprint for good reporting on science in the age of blogs, YouTube, and implanted science magazine brain chips (D’oh! I accidentally revealed my sinister plot.)

The line-up is daunting–Pulitzer Prize winners to the left, former directors of the National Science Foundation to the right. But I have a secret weapon. No, not the brain chips. I deny ever saying anything about brain chips. I’m talking about you, my loyal and perspicacious readers. As far as I can tell, I will be one of only two bloggers at the summit (the other is Mike Lemonick at Time). So let us pool our collective wisdom about these matters. As the media evolve into a strange new beast, what’s the best way to ensure that people get an accurate picture of science, and that they don’t get fed hogwash? How can people be sure they’re getting information based on real authority, rather than something hatched in a PR office? Share your thoughts in the comment thread here.

I won’t be surprised to hear a lot of harsh criticisms of the media. Astringent blogging about bad science writing is unquestionably good medicine. But there’s a limit to what simply complaining can accomplish. I think we need to balance destruction with creation–with constructive suggestions for shaping the new relationship of the media and science.

Update 5/29 10:30 am: It’s great to see the comments already flowing in. But reading the early responses, I realize I should clarify my request. Most of the suggestions so far would have been relevant 30 years ago. What can we do to improve the situation with the web 2.0 that couldn’t be done with newsprint?

A few months ago I got in my car and drove north until I reached a remarkable building filled with several million mice. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists are studying mice to understand many mysteries of genetics and medicine. But I was particularly curious about a project that they’ve only recently launched: an attempt to understand how many genes working together give rise to complex traits. When those complex traits go awry, the result may be a common disease such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The article I wrote about what I learned, “Mendel’s Mouse,” appears in the May issue of Discover. Discover posted the story today on their web site, where you can read it for free here. (I’ve also archived it here.)

Talking about this article is also a chance to add my two cents to a discussion that’s been bubbling for a few weeks: the clash between bloggers and scientific journal publishers. Last month Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle wrote a post about a paper, and included a chart that appeared in it. She promptly got a letter from Wiley, the journal’s publisher, menacing her with legal action unless she took the chart down. A long discussion then unfolded about fair use, a concept so mystical that I get a headache every time I try to figure out whether it applies to some text or image I’d like to use in my own work. Once the controversy reached Boing-Boing proportions, Wiley sent Batts a note telling her that it was all a big misunderstanding and that they “would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited.”

For us science writers, there’s a huge irony to this episode. Scientific journals like attention. The better-funded ones will go to great lengths to get stories written about their papers. They offer us science writers elaborately appointed press packages offering sneak peeks at papers coming out in the near future. They sometimes give us the cell phones of the authors of those papers, in case we need to call them in the middle of the night. They give us pretty photographs to use (as long as we fairly credit them).

But scientific journals also cling to conventions that block the news from spreading–particularly through the online world. Wiley, for example, initially reacted to Shelley not with enthusiasm, but with a menacing note. When Shelley responded by politely asking for permission, she was told to contact another person at Wiley. And when Wiley finally sort-of apologized, they still expected Shelley to jump through conventional hoops to get permission. All this kerfuffle over a little graph. It might have taken days to get permission to reprint it, which in the blogosphere is a geological era. Wiley was, consciously or unconsciously, going out of their way to squash interest in their papers.

Compare Shelley’s experience to what I’m about to do. I’m going to–shudder–reprint a diagram from a journal. Just lift it straight out. I like this diagram, because it elegantly conveys a point I tried to make in the Jackson Laboratory article, but Discover decided not to use it. So I’ll use it here.

We tend to think of traits as being controlled in a simple way by genes. One gene drives one trait. You sometimes hear people talking about the “gay gene,” the “depression gene,” and so on. But this view is almost entirely divorced from reality. The scientists at Jackson Laboratory illustrated this fact in a paper they published last summer in the journal PLOS Genetics. They looked for the genetic source of obesity in mice. They mated mice from dozens of inbred strains and then looked at later generations, meausuring variations in body weight, the size of fat pads, and other traits linked to obesity. They then pinpointed regions of the mouse genome where variations produced variations in those traits. They didn’t find an obesity gene. Instead, what they found was this:

You can click on the image to go to the source, which has details about the abbreviations. But the gist of the picture is easy enough to see. Each trait is influenced by many genes, and one gene may influence more than one trait. And different traits influence each other. And those influences can be positive or negative. This, I suspect, is what genetics is going to look like in the coming century.

And what do I now hear from PLOS? Do I hear the grinding of lawyerly knives? No. I hear the blissful silence of Open Access, a slowly-spreading trend in the journal world. PLOS makes it very clear on their web site that “everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world, for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish.” No muss, no fuss. If I want to blog about this paper right now, I can grab a relevant image right now from it. In fact, I just did.

I certainly appreciate the importance of copyrights (as the owner of many for my articles and books), but in these situations, keeping information behind a thick wall starts to seem a bit crazy, like the loss of precious bodily fluids. Far from committing some sort of violation to the PLOS paper, I have actually just spread the word about it. A few readers may even go back to read the original. And it was so easy and straightforward for me to do so that I will be very reluctant to bother with anything else.

Update: 5/24: Discover link fixed.

Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called “First World”–i.e., affluent places such as the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan. If true, that would be a shame, since it is potentially such a powerful tool for getting scientific information, no matter where you are in the world.

It’s a fair question, but an answer really demands more data than one trip by one person. The only information I can offer is what comes through my own blog. I’d say most readers come from the “First World” (I hate that phrase), but some also visit from South America, India, Southeast Asia, etc. I only know of a few science blogs beyond the US, Europe, and Australia–Brazil comes to mind at the moment.

So there’s at least some connection, but it may actually be a rather tiny one. I don’t have many connections in the blogosphere to the parts of the world where much of the most interesting biological research is carried out in the field–places like Tanzania, Indonesia, Ecuador. It’s not as if there aren’t some scientists who live and work in those regions…They’re just not blogging, as far as I can tell. But the view from outer Connecticut is very blurry.

So–are there any readers out there who can help answer this question? And given all the other pressures on science in the developing world, does the question even matter all that much?