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ScienceOnline2012
The heat is rising around ScienceOnline2012, the sixth annual meeting about the science and the Web, to be held in Raleigh NC on January 19-21, 2012. The first e-mail has gone to the mailing list (add yourself to it in order to get further updates), announcing the registration dates.
We are sifting through 55 printed pages of your Program Suggestions and will try to have the draft program posted on the site on Monday, October 31st, so you can see if a) your proposal is accepted, and b) what is it exactly that you will be signing up for.
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There will be four registration periods, each accepting about 100 people, followed by registration for the waitlist. The four dates/times are:
Tues, Nov 1st at 12 noon EDTThurs, Nov 3rd at 6 a.m. EDT
Tues, Nov 8th at 00:01 a.m. EST
Wed, Nov 9th at 6 p.m. EST
At least one of those dates/times you should be free to go online and register really, really fast (remember we filled up in 44 minutes last year!) - not in a meeting, or classroom, or sleeping in some far-away time zone.
When the time comes, go to the Registration page and fill out the form. Some basic information is already there so you should take a look.
We now also have an official Faceboook page you should "Like", an updated FriendFeed group to subscribe to, and of course our Twitter account and the hyperactive #scio12 hashtag for you to follow.
We want to help a number of students, unemployed, and people living very far away make it to the conference. For this, we rely, as always, on your generosity to provide travel grants for them. If you, as a person, or an organization, would like to help out, let us know ASAP.
Our friends at NESCent are again this year sponsoring travel for two bloggers who win their evolution blogging contest. The first entries are already in.
Learn more about the conference, its history and the coverage of the past five years of the event.
Article about science blogging in EMBO Journal
A new article about science blogging just came out - hurry up, though, as on December 1st it will be placed into the dark dungeons behind the paywall, never to be seen by human eyes again:
More than a blog: Should science bloggers stick to popularizing science and fighting creationism, or does blogging have a wider role to play in the scientific discourse?, by Howard Wolinsky:....Perhaps because of the increasingly public profile of popular science bloggers, as well as the professional and social value that is becoming attached to their blogs, science blogging is gaining in both popularity and validity. The content in science blogs covers a wide spectrum from genuine science news to simply describing training or running a lab, to opinionated rants about science and its social impact. The authorship is no less diverse than the content with science professionals, science journalists and enthusiastic amateurs all contributing to the melting pot, which also has an impact on the quality....
A number of bloggers were interviewed for the article (of course, each was quoted briefly, while I am sure each provided at least an hour of material that is now lost - remember that every quote is, by definition, a quote out of context, though my quotes are not too far off from what I intended to say), including Rosie Redfield, Jerry Coyne, Carl Zimmer, Daniel McArthur, Sean Carroll, PZ Myers, GrrlScientist and me.
Take a look.
#NYCSciTweetup
Although I am not going to be in NYC this week and cannot make it, you should go to #NYCSciTweetup if you can. But, what is it?
The Open Laboratory
After many months of finagling the contracts, it is all now signed, the FSG staff is warming up their amazing marketing machine to promote the anthology, and Jennifer has started the usual crowdsourced judging process, trying to reduce the numbers from 721 down to 52 entries. If she asks you to judge the posts, please say Yes if you can - we are on a tight schedule and everybody can help. Also, if a post of yours gets chosen, please respond promptly to our messages, edit and format the post as asked, etc., so we can start moving the book into production on schedule.
