Blogcritics Author: ggwfung

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

ScienceBlogs Network Reviewed - Part 3: The D's

ggwfung — Fri, 2 Feb 2007 21:46:13 EST

Science Blogs is a semi-professional network of people blogging about science. Most of them are in the university system as graduates or academics, but there is the odd journalist having their say. There are more than 50 blogs updated fairly regularly, and the network itself has been up for a year. This is part 3 of a continuing series of reviews (read part 1, part 2). The following two blogs are technical. The Daily Transcript is a blog by Alex Palazzo, a "postdoctoral fellow working in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School." The material is highly focused on what it's like to be a functional research scientist. Posts rarely stray from the central theme of lab life and pure biology, and even his highly curious series "Map that Campus", where readers are challenged to identify a university from an aerial footage shot, is an academic distraction. It's life from inside the ivory walls from a man in a lab coat, but unless you yourself are involved in the academic pursuit of Cell Biology, it won't compute. The Daily Transcript is smart, well-written, highly-informed, and driven, but ultimately, for most readers, it's too technical. Developing Intelligence is a blog by Chris Chatham, a "grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder." Topics include "developmental and computational cognitive neuroscience, comparative psychology, psychometrics, and artificial intelligence." That's pretty meaty stuff. Chris' basic approach is to take research papers and try and distill the general meaning in essay length works. This is the approach used by another blog in the mind sciences, but Chris on the most part adheres more closely to the technical language and tone of the original papers, and makes fewer concessions for the general reader. The writing, as far as I can assess, is pitched at a post-graduate level, so basically beyond you and I. It's a good looking blog, well maintained, updated daily, but in the end, just too technical.The following two blogs are non-technical. Deep Sea News is a partnership between Craig, a "post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute", and Peter, a "Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies." Fairly impressive titles, but this blog is salt of the earth, or in this case, salt of the sea. It casts back to the best traditions of popular science, sparking curiosity and bewonderment, explaining the phenomena in comprehensible language. It's all about communication between the expert and an interested reader, a transfer of knowledge and ideas, sharing the passion. Multiple postings take place either daily or every other day, and when images are used, they are striking and effective. In fact, given the highly visual nature of their interests - the sea, it's creatures, exploration vessels, wonderful kraken - photos could probably be used a bit more. And I'm also a big fan of sticking categories in the sidebar; don't make me fish for it in the archives. Deep Sea News is a solid blog with wide appeal. Recommended. Dispatches from the Culture Wars is by Ed Brayton, a "freelance writer and businessman". This blog is an exceptionally fine example of intelligent critique, of the public examination of ideas and their effects. Topics range from Intelligent Design, through Civil Liberties, Law and Politics. It's a fairly broad sweep, but what holds it together is the probing analysis, presenting real-world incidents, examining reality. It's a fairly feisty forum of inquiry; always a ton of comments presenting alternate angles and drawing new evidence. It's an active and engaged place, and represents the best spirit of vigorous debate. The main page is well-laid out; with sizable chunks of each post presented; you click through to read the whole thing, and you get the comments at the same time. Categories aren't used all that consistently; many posts aren't classified at all. Entertaining, eclectic, challenging; Ed lives up to his billing as a modern-day Plato. Recommended.The following two blogs are mediocre. Deltoid is a blog by Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. A self-appointed debunker, Tim blogs about whatever happens to catch his interest at any particular moment. Stuff ranges from global warming through to critiquing journal articles. Tim claims to find flaws in other people's arguments and then gets super angry. He climbs the pulpit, and starts raging. He declaims, he gets aggressive, he undermines. I find it totally unpalatable, and its the sort of stuff you read in the letters section of tabloid newspapers. Pretty mediocre. Discovering Biology in a Digital World is Sandra Porter's blog. In her own words, she is "a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepeneur." And her passion is "developing instructional materials for 21st century biology." Sounds alright, until you have to read her blog. Her scattergun approach of turning here, turning there, turning up, turning down, is just befuddling. It's just a mishmash, a mess, totally incoherent. There is a supposed central thread of microbiology and genomics, but it's like picking random pages from a textbook. It's updated daily, but I think that makes the problem even worse. Highly mediocre.The following two blogs are crap. Dr Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refugee: crap is a fairly relative term. It might be me talking crap, it might be me talking crap about someone else's crap, or it might be someone else writing crap about my crap. In the end, it's all crap. But you have to admit, some things are crapper than others. Dr Joan is a "biochemist and a minion of the dark lords of pharma" and she collaborates with Kevin and Jim. Menage a trois doesn't work in real life, and it doesn't work for blogging. It's just everywhere. No coherence, no focus, no sense of purpose. Three people blogging away in all different directions. Collaborative blogs are hard things to pull off, and if you want to study how to do it, go read GigaOM. There has to be a clear delineation between authors, with a clear end goal; team effort guys. Fairly crap. Dynamics of Cats: I have to admit, I was expecting to read about pets and kitty litter when I dropped into this blog. I know there are "star catalogues" and such like, but the punning is a bit beyond me. Stein Sigurdsson is an "astrophysicist at Penn State". The blog is about astronomy, but the number of posts that are tagged random will give you an idea of how scattered this thing is. Many posts only show up with the first paragraph, so the main page acts as an index, which means you have to click through to read each article. That's a pain. It also wastes the reader's valuable time. This deadly combination of lack of focus and a poor interface make the blog almost unreadable. Pretty crap.

Ideas Man

because punditry never dies

ScienceBlogs Network Reviewed - Part 2: The C's

ggwfung — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:08:57 EST

Science Blogs is a semi-professional network of people blogging about science. Most of them are in the university system as graduates or academics, but there is the odd journalist having their say. There are more than 50 blogs updated fairly regularly, and the network itself has been up for a year. This is part 2 of a continuing series of reviews. (read part 1 here) Sometimes we can look out on the world with a lazy eye. It can all seem so ordinary and flat, and we forget the pure wonder of delight that we had as youngsters; that enchantment and broad grin. One person who hasn't forgot is Karmen, "a philosopher, freelance writer, and mother, living at the foot of the Rockies, in Arvada, Colorado." She is also "a full-time student, seeking a double major in philosophy and ecology/evolutionary biology, and a part-time website and graphic design artist." A busy life, no? She also finds time to author the blog Chaotic Utopia, a wondrous little gift to the world. This blog could almost double as an art magazine; there are fractals galore, nature shots of the beach and sea, strange mozaics. As for the actual mechanics of Chaotic Utopia, they work quite well. The sidebar is simple and functional; profile, recent posts, recent comments, archives, blogroll, plus a few other choice links (though I couldn't find a tag list). Posting is generally once every two days, but that's fine; a lot of love and care goes into each article; there's nothing of the throwaway about this site. So after all the poetry and complexity I've just described, what is this blog about? Don't know. Is it science? not sure. Do you like it? yes. Are you a yes man? no. Have a visit, then show me the enchantment in your eyes. A gem. Cancer isn't the bogeyman it once was. It struck our lungs through smoking and coal-filled air, peeled away our skin by sunlight, erupted into our interiors through mal-functioning gonads, ate away at our very brains. It was a horrific and painful way to die. We can thank the Twentieth Century for bringing the malevolence of cancer under control. Tools for treatment and diagnosis have become everyday, and awareness campaigns keep us alert. We can now confidently take the battle up to this disease, and scourge it. There have been untold numbers of people working in the field of cancer, or oncology by its proper name, and Dr Craig Hildreth is one of them. His blog, The Cheerful Oncologist, is a madcap combination of medicine and the arts; of disease treatments and poetry. It's a hoot. Posts range from little anecdotes about troublesome patients, 20 line slabs of poetry with analysis and all, and relating some of the more interesting medical findings. It's like having someone sit down in front of you and tell stories. Posting is only once every two or three days, which makes you want for more, but that's about my only gripe. Oh, and the doctor tells me "he would give his right arm to be ambidextrous". A classic. The mind is a wonderful place. It has seemingly infinite rooms, is portable, can be taught, and doesn't weigh very much. We can all benefit by finding out more about it; how it works, how it doesn't work, how it might have evolved, and how it develops in the span of a human lifetime. Cognitive Daily is a blog devoted to pursuing these questions. Maintained by a husband and wife team, Dave Munger is "a freelance writer and former editor" and Greta Munger is "Associate Professor of Psychology at Davidson College". Their stated aim is - "Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field." And moreover, "The research isn't dumbed down, but it's explained in language that everyone can understand, with clear illustrations and references to the original research." So how do they go? Blogging is an artform, and it's all about striking the right balances. Proper articles need to be published, but there is also the inevitable blog-maintenance work that needs to be done; asking for reader feedback, referencing your own podcasts. Personally I find podcasting, in this case "audio blogging", a little redundant. You can type it, or you can speak it, the choice is up to you. Having both is a nice option. But back to the blog, yes, there is a good judicious balance between the blog proper, and this other support material. Dave responds to comments, and actively seeks out reader input. The range of material is excellent, and taken from a variety of sources. Overall, a very solid contribution, very safe. Eight out of ten. We all have a brain. The brain has two halves. The two halves are connected. They are connected by the Corpus Callosum, a thick mass of white fibres. Finding the connection between things is what the blog Corpus Callosum tries to do. The author is "a psychiatrist at a small community hospital somewhere in midwestern USA". His mission statement? - "to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy." That's bold. It's essentially a statement of the left brain (logical, sequential, rational) vs the right brain (intuitive, subjective, holistic) divide, and his deep desire to bridge that gap, the so-called eponymous Corpus Callosum. How does he go? It's a huge undertaking. The writer is basically trying to synthesise the world, to put it's composite pieces together, and while not an official Theory of Everything, when you go out hunting for different things, you end up hunting in a lot of different places. Just some of his topics include medicine, politics, computing, energy, environment, and psychiatry. It's a bit overwhelming at times, almost bursting at the seams; he finds the connections between individual things, but what about connecting the connections? That wasn't in his brief, but it can make for a hard slog of reading. A bit here, there, and everywhere. I applaud his goal (and recommend EO Wilson's Consilience to any who have the same interests) but the erratic, leaping nature of his posting is not for everyone. I can say, quite positively, that this man has one impressive blogroll. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and is a testament to the author's huge range of interests. Ambivalent rating.

Ideas Man

because punditry never dies

ScienceBlogs Network Reviewed - the A's

ggwfung — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:33:23 EST

Science Blogs is a semi-professional network of people blogging about science. Most of them are in the university system as graduates or academics, but there is the odd journalist having their say. There are more than 50 blogs updated fairly regularly, and the network itself has been up for a year. This is part 1 of a continuing series of reviews. Behind every large institution there are those who oil the wheels, line up the gears, set up the chess pieces. They are the administrators. Science is no different. There are scientists, there are those who write about science, and there are those who organise the people writing about science. A Blog Around the Clock can be considered an administrative science blog par excellence. The author, coturnix, describes himself as a "Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student with Thesis-writing block and severe blogorrhea trying to understand the world". This mad torrent of words also characterises his approach to blogging. It reads like a true web log, a running diary of his day - organising Science Blogging Conferences, linking to new material, compiling an Anthology of the Best Science Blog Writing, passing remarks on whatever catchs his fancy. It's a fantastically busy hive of constant activity. But unless you are deep inside this insider's science world, it can seem all so haphazard and trivial. What's missing is a relevance to the general reader, something to bind all these disparate threads together, an overarching vision. In the end, all A Blog Around the Clock ends up doing is spinning around itself in dizzy circles. Peoples, cities, cultures, all leave their tracks in time. It is the purpose of archaeology to make sense of that broken pottery, corroded coin, or barely defined glyph. Reconstructing the past from fragments of time - this is what the blog Aardvarchaeology is all about. The author is Swedish, a journal editor, and an archaeologist to boot. The blog is a fairly recent arrival to the network, but Martin was blogging for about 12 months at his previous site. He has developed a crisp, clean style - effective and to the point, but not blunt. Most posts are accompanished by a tactful image, and the text does not usually run to over a page - making it quite easy to navigate and browse through his blog. Martin also sticks quite closely to his chosen subject, something I applaud in a world of everpresent distractions. If I had to pick one word to describe this blog, it would be robust. Well done. How one's conduct relates to a group is what is known as ethics. This is an all-pervasive feature of working science, although it's not well known to the wider public. It only really comes to attention when there is fraud on a massive scale, like some of the ones that have rocked the journals Science and Nature in recent times. Ethics starts with the individual, radiates outwards to his immediate research group, pervades the faculty and department, and eventually sits inside the institution of which he or she is part of. Adventures in Ethics and Science is devoted to examing this working interface. In her words "this is the blog where I muse on responsible conduct of scientific research, communication between scientists and non-scientists about the issues that matter to both camps, and teaching science and ethics." Does she succeed? Perhaps I was expecting something more rigorously argued, dealing with more serious issues, but all I ended up reading about was holidays, little schoolkids, and pretty ordinary chit-chat. The ethics stuff is there, but it's sparse, and you really have to go to the sidebar to dig it out. My major criticism of this blog is that it is personal first, and only professional by a distant second. In my mind, if you are blogging as part of a network, the group goal takes priority. Keep the personal stuff personal, or start another blog if you want a diary. A low rating. Across vast stretches of times, spanning dynasties and kingdoms, fiefdoms and tribal warfares, empires and minor tyrannies, man has been under the constant burden and threat of disease. Borne by the water he so dearly needs, living amongst muck and vermin, breathing fetid air, consuming wretched food, illness struck regularly and swiftly. We now live in a golden age of health knowledge. Understanding the causes of disease enabled us to eliminate them, a field known as Aetiology, of which this blog bears the same name. Tara is an assistant professor, and is especially interested in the microbiological causes of disease, something better known as germs to you and me. We're talking flu, malaria, hiv, e coli, and various viruses and bacteria, the stuff most sane people run away from. But hey, someone has to do it, and she does it with cheerful alacrity. I just have a couple of niggling concerns about her blogging style - one is a tendency to tag articles with every category possible, which defeats the whole purpose of tagging things, and two, there is a lot of chit-chat which isn't reader related. It is her blog, and she can write whatever she wants to, but joe average has no idea what a blog carnival is and doesn't need to know. If every third post is just noise, people will eventually make a value assessment. Is it really worthwhile sticking to? It's a shame, because there is a lot of insight that can be garnered from this blog. An ambivalent rating. What is 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds, and has a cranial capacity of 410 cubic centimetres? It could be a little goblin, but in this case here, it is referring to Australopithecus afarensis, an ancestral human form from 3 million years ago, the ape that climbed down from the trees and started to walk. Afarensis also happens to be a blog written a hobbyist anthropologist, someone who earns his living outside the scientific world. Topics up for general discussion include fossils, evolution, the pseudoscience of creationism, and of course, all sorts of different primates. There is the occasional foray into politics, and what he describes as the "war on science". Posting is generally daily, and is done with a fairly light touch - with the minimal of jargon, and with the bemused eye of a curious, patient observer. Great for a general read, and it's almost worth leaving a comment on his blog to get the title of "Austrolopithecine", the name he gives to his commenters. A seven out of ten.

Ideas Man

because punditry never dies