Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting Interactive

As you may recall, the SfN is encouraging so-called interactive media (aka, social media, aka Twittbook and FriendBlog) at the upcoming Annual Meeting. Registration for consideration to be one of their officially linked blogtwitsters closed 9/24.
I have been receiving a little bit of chatter about this, at this late date. The answer is “No”, I haven’t heard anything about anyone being selected. Have you?
Personally my bet is that they had no idea what they were really going to do with this, received far more applicants than expected, hadn’t considered the pseud-blogger issues, probably not those of us with semi-commercial or very commercial affiliations, et, etc. So they are, I wager, still getting their act together. I would counsel patience and not to “E-mail program@sfn.org for more information.” more than once a day :-).
If you do feel obligated to contact them do me a favor would you? Try to edumacate ’em about actually using these social media?
Those proposed hashtags? #sfnthemeh? Really? That translates “SFN is the Meh”, this is NotGood, people!!
And anyway these theme hastags are spectacularly uninformative. Hate to break it to you but nobody navigates the meeting by those stupid bloody thematic letters! You think Twitt followers are going to use those? HA! Plus, they are too long for re-Twitts. Cut that action down to #sfna, #sfnb, etc if you absolutely insist the themes are useful tags…

Science-Up the Schools with….Mink?

Great Job on the DonorsChoose drive, folks! The DrugMonkey Blog Science-Up the Schools Challenge is doing well with $422 raised from 16 donors. This latter makes me very happy since we’re hanging in there in the top three on the ScienceBlogs board in terms of number of donors. We’re in difficult times and my readers are often grad students and postdocs who don’t have a lot to give anyway but I love to see people getting involved and endorsing the importance of science in elementary and secondary education. Keep it coming! Every $5 or even $1 donation moves a project closer to funding. Some of them are backed by matching funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so you might even leverage your kick-down.