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Standards and Practices

Language. For me, it boils down to language.
I’ll let the Big Dog fill you in:

Blogrolling: Rock Talk

Arlenna’s post today alerted me to a brand new blog from the Office of Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health. The OER is, of course, the office that handles, well, us. The NIH funded extramural research community. Anyone who works in a lab that is funded by the NIH is under the umbrella of the OER in one way or another. The fact that they have taken up blogging is of more than a passing interest to those of us in the extramural research community that read and write blogs.
Rock Talk is authored by Dr. Sally Rockey (pictured), who is:

NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research, serving as the principal scientific leader and advisor to the NIH Director on the NIH extramural research program.

This is fantastic. She’s already jumping in to grapple with topics, such as Family Medical Leave and NIH policies in support thereof, that originally arose in the academic blogosphere.
That’s a win for you, Dear Reader. It means that someone very high up at the NIH is listening to your issues, ideas and complaints that you blurt out in this particular forum. Fantastic.
My advice is to put this on your blogroll, your RSS or whatnot. Stop by and comment. Nothing like traffic and commentary to convince an entity like the NIH that this is a valuable activity in which to engage. And who knows? Maybe some brilliant observation of yours will influence NIH policy.
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crossposting from Scientopia

MsPhD of Young Female Scientist Stops Blogging

The goodbye post is here, stop by and drop a note of thanks.
I’ve certainly enjoyed reading her perspectives over the past several years and I know many of you have as well. Whether you’ve agreed, disagreed or had other reactions it has been a quintessential life-in-academia type of blog….and a good one.
As my reader’s know, I’m all about the differing viewpoints. I feel quite strongly that none of us gets more than a tiny pinhole of a window on so-called objective reality. It is through listening to the experiences of others that we best broaden our view and especially when it comes to academic careers, this is a very good thing.
Personally, of course, I’m grateful that MsPhD getting all angry about this blog post of mine at my original WordPress home really accelerated my audience.

Thanks, MsPhD!

My post was published at the end of August, 2007 and hers appeared in early September so the data are relatively clean. Naturally her fellow disgruntledocs came over to beat me up and, well, …you know how much PP and I enjoy that sort of discussion. I think you can see the sustained effect, not atypical for new blogs.
Getting back to the question of perspectives and “truth”, MsPhD’s current post includes this comment:

Between being completely sidelined by other bloggers who act like I’m just too crazy to be right,

At least from my point of view this is not the issue. I am familiar with at least one PI out of whose lab a person could easily have the experiences as described by MsPhD in the course of her blogging. The question is rather whether these situations are common to all of science or are relatively rare. I certainly come down on the side of rarer-than-described-by-MsPhD and that has led to numerous of our disagreements. I also feel that there are always steps one can take to advantage oneself in a bad training environment and I clearly have a lot of company in this among the science-blogs and associated commentariat. Therein lay much opportunity for discussing common problems in academic careers and we should all be grateful to MsPhD for being the focal point for so many good discussions.
Although I’m a latecomer to YFS, I still regret that the commentary, particularly on her blog, was at times fairly personal and also that MsPhD appears to take every generalization of her scenarios as personal. Personally, I tried to make it clear where I was generalizing the situation but that doesn’t always work, particularly when one perceives that one is a target. Clearly she’d been having similar discussions long before I even found science blogs, so it isn’t like it is anyone’s fault in particular. Ultimately there is only so much generalizing one can do when launching from a personal anecdote. Still, it is important in all of this to recognize and extract the general career advice that emerges from the various discussions. I would advise all readers, old and new, of the various excellent discussions sparked by MsPhD to try to view debates as a contrast of experiences and viewpoint, rather than a contrast of personalities or individuals.
Happy trails, MsPhD. I wish you the best in your future endeavors.

A new blogging collective: Occam’s Typewriter

A bunch of refugees from the Nature Network blogging outfit have set up shop as Occam’s Typewriter. Very nice. Been waiting to hear about this since the mutterings over at Nature Network turned ugly a few months back. Okay, maybe it was several months back. Anyway, we can consider this part of the great 2010 science-blog-collective asplosion.
First look–
The lineup includes our good blog friend Cath who brought VWXYNot? aboard. Also Stephen Curry (Reciprocal Space) who I’ve usually found to not only be readable but a decent conversationalist on blog, you know, as a relative matter. Of course they also have spittle boy, but whatevs. whatevs.
Overall I think you will find that this collective contains most of the chatty in-crowd from the glory days of Nature Network so if that’s your kind of thing, you will find yourself quickly at home over there.
Other notes…
Powered by WordPress- Brilliant, as the British types would have it. Should allow them to act like a real blog community and view their stats and referrals and stuff. Big ups there.
They seem to have brought over some of the more conversation-stifling aspects of Nature Network (see community guidelines) which seem to boil down to “no sockin’ and no swearin’”. Can’t say I think that’s positive but given the lineup I’m unsurprised.
At least they have ditched the registration-to-comment millstone. So a bit of a win there.
The Irregulars will be a guest column type of blog, pretty good idea. In fact such a good idea that one wonders where they came up with it? Hmm. Well, since another one of their community guidelines is “No stealin’ (without attribution)” I’m sure that isn’t anything like what it looks to be…
One stylistic element that is unusual for a collective is that once off in the sub-blogs there is not a lot of navigational help in getting to the other ones. There’s a small text link at the top to get back to the collective main page but otherwise we’ll be left up individual sidebar choices, I guess.
Latest comments feed is a good idea and will help with cross-blog integration and navigation if you make use of it. Always a tricky thing because if you have a firehose of too many comments it gets unwieldy. But they should stay small and focused for a good while I would think.

Twelve Months of [insert your blog here]…

Seeing how it is December, it is time for a year in review. There is no better bloggy way than this meme.

The rules for this blog meme are quite simple.
-Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

For your browsing pleasure, I’ll round up…
Twelve Months of

• DrugMonkey
• The Prodigal Academic
• Deep Sea News
• The Spandrel Shop (Prof-like Substance)
• The Urban Ethnographer (kdcosta)
• Genomic Repairman
• Pondering Blather (Odyssey)
• Anthropology in Practice
• Thus Spake Zuska
• The Thoughtful Animal (Jason G. Goldman)
• It’s a Micro World after all (Thomas Joseph)
• Neurodynamics
• Denim and Tweed (Yoder)

Please welcome Dean’s Corner to Scienceblogs.com

The latest recruit to Scienceblogs.com is Dr. Jeffrey H. Toney . His blurb says he

…is an educator and a scientist whose career has spanned academia and the pharmaceutical industry. He serves as the dean of the College of Natural, Applied and Health Sciences at Kean University. He is dedicated to strengthening public appreciation of the beauty and impact of science in our daily lives.

Sounds pretty good to me.
His background is overviewed in an early entry, entitled “Why ScienceBlogs is So Important“
You can find him on Twitter as @jefftoney

SfN 2010: The BlogTwittup

Dr Becca and Tideliar, both of LabSpaces.net, have organized a social event for the online folks during the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. Details are on this banner and you can visit Fumbling Toward Tenure Track or Some Lies to see who you might find attending.

Wired Science Blog Network Launches!

crossposting from DM on Scientopia:
Wow. Wired Science has launched a blog network of six writers that looks fashioned in the mold of the Discovery Magazine blog stable. Look who’s joined up.

Wired Science Blog Network

Pretty good lineup, mostly ex-Scienceblogs.com authors, looks like- Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus is the only one of the six to not previously have blogged at the Sb, as far as I know.
There’s a couple of things that jump out, in addition to the WOW! factor of such interesting writers being pulled together. @KateClancy observed:

Wow, only one woman in the new Wired Science Blog network… it’s like we just don’t do science or write about it…

@myrmecos noted:

@KateClancy another trend in new science blog networks is that there aren’t any scientists in them, just journalists.

And naturally, your most humble narrator noticed that the lineup is kinda….pale.
Perhaps these are issues they might care to address with any subsequent recruiting they might do….

Ed Yong and the Gonadomorphic Chicken: A Blogging Success Story

Seriously. You need to read
In which I set up a collaboration between a biologist, a farmer and a chimeric chicken
Everyone will be wetting themselves over the blogging angle but this is just a cool story no matter how it happened.

w000t! CPDD joins the blogosphere!!!!!1111!!!!

I am delighted to report that the College on Problems of Drug Dependence has joined the science blogosphere. The CPDD Community Website is a new effort of the Media Relations Committee and intends to be:

a moderated Blog open to comment by CPDD members and invited contributors.

The email notification I received indicates that the comments and the blog will be open to the public so no worries, they are just planning to moderate* the content.
The initial offerings include:
A comment from the new editor of the College’s journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence on changes to the journal.
A link-heavy update on the proposed NIDA-NIAAA merger.
A response to the McCain-Coburn attack on drug abuse research included in their mid-summer sneer at ARRA projects.
A general post on the politics of substance abuse research.
And what’s this? Little old us in the blogroll? Awwwww.
Well done, CPDD, well done.
[my CPDD related posts are here]
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*I’ll work on ‘em DearReader, don’t worry.
CPDD.org
CPDD Facebook
Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Abel Pharmboy moves Terra Sigillata to…

Our great blog friend Abel Pharmboy has a new home for one of my (and yours, Dear Reader, and yours) favorite blogs.
He has joined the stable of blogs in the Chemical and Engineering News site for blogging, CENtral Science.
Congrats to Abel and congrats to CENtral Science.
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crossposted.

The scienceblogging aggregator to end all aggregators

This is unbelievable. BRILLIANT!
Bora Zivkovic, Anton Zuiker and Dave Munger have come up with something really special.

Scienceblogging.org

Scrolling down you will note over 50 sites of online science being aggregated. So to quickly review all that is new in the discussion of science online, all you need to do is swing by and give it a quick scan.
I like.
Bora explains here, Munger here.

LabSpaces.net evolves into a science blogging collective

and a powerhouse at that.
LabSpaces was previously a science news aggregator but now has jumped hard into the science blogging game with some key acquisitions. Many of them are some of our good blog and Twitt friends including:
DamnGoodTechnician
Odyssey of Pondering Blather (joining the kids, old man? )
biochem belle of There and Back Again
Dr. Becca of Fumbling Toward Tenure Track
Genomic Repairman
…and they have a bunch of other bloggers over there that you will like (and may already know).
kudos to Brian Krueger for assembling this new blog collective. Looks like great reading ahead.

Scientopia: a new science blogging network

A brand new science blogging collective has launched itself today. I encourage you to stroll on over to http://scientopia.org/blogs and take a look-see. You may even want to save a bookmark or two.
The vision statement reads as follows:

Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible.
As a community, we strive to be welcoming of anyone with an interest in science and its place in our world, regardless of any feature, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, which may act or have historically acted as a barrier to full participation in science or discourses about science.

Hippie statements aside, I think you will find that Scientopia has some interesting voices lined up for your reading pleasure. So go take a look.