Christina's LIS Rant

ROTFL: SPSS is the "secret sauce"

2008-04-24T12:30:00.002-04:00

A news report by Stephen Levy of Newsweek heard on WTOP this morning says that SPSS is the secret sauce for microtargeting voters.... tee-hee... I guess he didn't really do enough homework and definitely didn't take a statistics for social sciences class ;)
Today the report is available from: http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=10, on the left hand side... of course tomorrow it will be gone.

Workshop: Social technology for biodiversity

2008-04-23T15:15:00.002-04:00

University of Maryland's (world-famous) HCIL is hosting it's 25th Annual Symposium and Open House May 29-30. The second day will be full of workshops and I'll be presenting at the one on social computing technologies for biodiversity. Specifically, I'll be presenting on science blogging and I'll be learning from the participants, too.

This promises to be a very exciting event and I would encourage anyone who is anywhere near the area and who has a research interest to consider attending.

The other workshops look pretty incredible, too, as do the symposium events.

"Trusting" Pseudonymous Bloggers

2008-04-22T09:02:00.002-04:00

ScienceBlogs has this poll...

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Of course, it's been my contention since about 2004 that any/all bloggers build trust in their audiences over time. I'm not sure real-world scientific authority conferred through publications is really all that meaningful to the people outside your research area or really to people who read your blog. One of the STS folks studied this and found that members of the public primarily judge scientists by their institutional affiliation, sigh.

Also interesting, probably worth study, is that lo and behold people select which blogs to read by if they are well written and if they have a unique/fun/funny/entertaining voice...

Goodbye to a library advocate, and physicist

2008-04-15T09:17:00.002-04:00

Via Molly and Dana

The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler died earlier this week at the age of 96. There are plenty of fond memories in the science blogosphere (see for example, those at CosmicVariance), but I wanted to give broader voice to his support for libraries as evidenced by his commencement speech at the library school at UT entitled: Selling Library Service.

What can I say to you who have done so much, worked so hard, and are about to go forth to give the world so much? My message is a simple one. It is not enough for you only to give library and information service to those who know enough to ask for it. You will only occupy the place of leadership in the community that rightly belongs to you if you go out and sell the idea of library and information service to those as yet untouched by it.

Nothing does more than information, rightly grasped, to open the doors of the world to a better tomorrow; and no agency does more than the library—in today's new and wider sense—to provide the most reliable information, the best thinking on the whole sweep of human concerns. The library is the university of the people.

(as an aside - it's not the scientists who are anti-library - it's the management/administration- who think that the next generation doesn't need the help finding, organizing, and acquiring information that they did. IMO library schools, alongside professional associations are paramount in defending and publicizing libraries... the study of information is not enough, we need libraries!)

STGlobal2008: Day 2 Wrap-Up

2008-04-06T15:18:00.002-04:00

It's so interesting going to a conference outside of LIS. I very well might have been the only one there blogging the conference and the one photographer didn't plan to put pictures up on flickr or anything. It's interesting, too, because the European students had incredibly different perspectives on science policy than the Americans did - in particular the Americans interested in defense, space, or national security issues.

The Day 2 Plenary was given by Professor Fabian Muniesa who is at the Ecole des Mines in Paris.
His points were very interesting - he spoke of the current research at his university as an example of the combination of STS and science policy studies and provided a specific example from their current research to highlight this combination.
He spoke of
economizing - meaning saving money, but also meaning making things calculable
politicizing - meaning making things arguable (not in a pejorative sense but to open for public participation - interesting, because clearly this isn't the meaning most people would think of so this might be a cultural translation)

He gave a history of sociology in his engineering school, and spoke of their current efforts with Sciences Po and MIT to develop a pedagogy for the analysis of controversies (see: http://www.demoscience.org/).

The case he gave is the results of a watershed law in France, the LOLF, which is intended to revolutionize, modernize, and reform the financial and budgetary systems. It's sort of like a massive Government Performance & Results Act (GPRA) type thingy, but with the added stress of direct linkages to funding, and a change of the information systems and nomenclature required to do government financial business (wow!). It's deciding on the allocation of funds through missions, objectives, etc., instead of via the pre-existing gov't structure. Another key aspect is the performance indicators --- including scientometrics *using WoS data*. Hm, why is no one on the SIG-metrics list talking about this - or maybe they did a few years ago? So you see, lots of rich research areas there.

Lots of good stuff that I'm not going to bother transcribing from my notes - but interesting about the performativity of indicators... "gaming in targetworld" (see what looks to be a fascinating article by Hood in 2006). This model and way of describing this phenomenon seems much clearer than "teaching to the test" and others.

The student session was next, and once again lots of interesting stuff -- almost all of us had real issues with timing (I was cut off 2/3 the way through my slides, oops, one guy went so fast he made my head spin) and audience (one guy spent a ton of time showing us pictures of voting machines - which were probably only informative for those living under rocks or, who knows, maybe the people from Europe). I really didn't get much time for feedback, unfortunately. I think my topic was appropriate for the conference, but it definitely could be presented to make
more sense to the attendees. I don't intend to put my slides on slideshare because I'm still planning to do more with the work, but I could send them via e-mail if anyone is interested.

Nature Geosciences Commentaries on Science Blogs

2008-04-05T22:42:00.005-04:00

yeah, I know what I said about nature geosciences, but this is special, and you can get the article with free registration. (oh, yeah, they must be out to get bloggers to read their journal - there are also two commentaries on gender)

via: Peer-to-Peer
Both from the April 2008 (v1 n4) issue of Nature Geosciences.

To blog or not to blog? - p208
Gavin Schmidt
doi:10.1038/ngeo170
Some interesting points about the nuances of communicating science to the public and also why a member of the public won't really be able to access the science even if they can get physical access to an article. Talks about informal scholarly communication as "second-stage peer review." He oversells the ability of the average scientist to successfully translate all of the bumps and wiggles of the graph - but essentially, I think he's right on with using the stories told over time in a blog to transmit tacit knowledge.

Minority report - p209
Myles Allen
doi:10.1038/ngeo174
Starts with thinking that it's good to rebut rubbish reports, but then an article of his was rebutted on RealClimate and "By the time I heard about it...." My immediate response to that is surprise that he doesn't read that blog given the field he's in? I have a bunch of ego feeds in my name, surely I'd see articles written about me... So the author didn't rebut the misinterpretation, and this got trotted out later by journalists, etc. He seems to be suggesting that commentary and discussion on peer reviewed papers should be in and only in peer reviewed journals -- in the peer reviewed portion of the journal (so, like, not letters or commentary I guess) and that scientists shouldn't talk to journalists and that journalists should read the peer reviewed articles themselves? Yeah, right, that's how it works.

I see what he's saying, but the majority of the scientists are pretty respectful and careful on their blogs when talking about science. It would have been more appropriate for him to have engaged the blogger in conversation so then both could have learned and shared.

Update: there is a lot of interesting discussion on this in the geoblogosphere (like on geosciences blogs), I recommend these for further reading.

STGlobal2008: Second Plenary

2008-04-05T22:10:00.003-04:00

(I'm so glad I had my computer out and tried to get notes - this was an amazing talk, but really fast and really clever so the notes don't do it justice

David J. Goldston
Former staff director for the U. S. House committee on science.

One of the goals of his talk was to talk about areas of research that need STS research.

There is a confusion between the study of things, and the things themselves

example: discussion of new Illinois physicist in congress – science deals with fact and congress deals with …. so the physicist is just what we all need to set congress straight
fundamental fallacy that policy is just about establishing fact – that the barrier to policy formulation is the establishment of fact. This is rare in public policy.
- mere fact is irrelevant to discussion in cases like stem cell research
- climate change looks more like fact issue, but it is much more like an outlier (congress asking a scientific, factual question, to which science has a consensus answer is really rare and distorting)

sts can help in the science community and help understand that it isn’t all about “fact”
also look for intersections where science can help policy
- conflicts of interest
- mechanistic aspects

looking toward science in a polarized environment – tendency to conflate science and policy is more likely – want a scientific explanation for everything (see Merton, Goldston suggests Ibsen title)

that was about science informing other policy, about science policy itself…
NAS Rising Above the Gathering Storm (2005) – case study science policy, but very similar to Vannevar Bush famous Frontier piece… 1980s debate is missing, emphasis is mostly on university and basic science
recommendations were:
* increase in physical science research (8%, totally arbitrary), (NIH doubling of funding over 5 years was a “catastrophic success” – money good, more better, but too fast all at once probably not so much), deciding how much, how, metrics, impacts on universities… basic questions unanswered..
* more funding for younger researchers – he’s on a panel now -- how do you measure that? how do you know what the current status is?
* more “transformative” research – what does that mean? can you tell in advance? how can you identify in advance things that will shake things up? more than a matter of funding.
* energy research – ARPA-E to jump start energy research – argument by analogy – but we can’t solve these very different problems the same way…Energy may have more to do with market failures, not actual R&D failures – no research – can prime pump, but no market for new technologies so no incentives

need for research impact of science on the public (I got that wrong)
- he’d like to see a study comparing claims about potential value of the internet vs. value of tv (gosh, hasn’t this been done – a lot!)

q: supply driven innovation vs. demand driven innovation (grand challenges problem vs. …) Sacks vs. Nature editorial (HIV vaccine?)
a: it can’t be either/or, the HIV vaccine is a bad example, biomed is actually more direct from research to problem in society… Good example is carbon sequestration (do we know enough to demo, or do we need to go back to basic sciences)… need a range of approaches depending on what you’re talking about, but generally right that you need to keep eventual uses in mind – get farther head if less scattered

q: which areas of science impact on public are most promising from DC insider view
a: nano has been interesting – but funding because gov’t regulatory interest – very difficult to get these done in other areas where not a clear line to regulatory or other gov’t interest

q: separate science policy from technology policy, what is appropriate model for energy if not earpa
a: range of tools like energy standards (efficiency) can create a market
how effective are DOE labs – academics say that’s the problem – all the money to DOE labs, maybe more analysis of how the labs are producing new science (?)

q: sts too abstract, science policy all about budget, scientists/engineers all a technology problem – how can we get together to solve these things
a: maybe we can find big problems, then address all of the ways to approach this using all of the tools and approaches we have from the various areas --- instead of generating questions from within the research area.

q: is it fair to spend 50% of the budget on Defense?
a: 50% of the discretionary budget so take away… 50% of R&D. Do we spend too much on defense? It would be great if we were in a situation where we needed to spend less money on defense…. but money going to defense still does address energy and other questions.. we could be using the budget more effectively to impact other needs

q: how can we influence, once
a: depends on where you end up – it’s a relatively small community with a few pressure points – so if you are in the right place, and you have the right people in the right place, there’s a lot of drag in the system, but you can make changes

q: blah, blah, blah OTA (faculty member who, from his bio, used to work for OTA)
a: OTA is more a symbol and myth… so it might not hurt to bring it back, but the people are still around various places.. you might not like the decisions being made, but OTA probably wouldn’t have had any better access to the information than other groups providing analysis

q: impact of election on …
a: bad rap with Bush admin and science, so it will be a chance to start over again in some ways…. all three agree to address issues of climate change…. what doesn’t change is the use of science to justify policy, tone will change, but these science & policy issues won’t change. Science funding relies more heavily on what is happening in the overall budget outlook – and less on what is actually happening in science.

STGlobal2008: Opening Plenary

2008-04-05T22:01:00.002-04:00

The wireless there didn't work, so I'm entering these later. This is the STS Grad Student conference sponsored by a bunch of universities and the AAAS. It's being held April 5-6 at AAAS off of New York Avenue in D.C.

Flattening the World: The role of science and tech policy in …
Dr. Nina Fedoroff
Science adviser to State and USAID

Digital divide is a more complex problem than just cheap laptops and cell phones will address
Collier(2007) The Bottom Billion. Oxford U Press – educational capacity, sending students to western countries for education frequently doesn’t serve home country, but increases brain-drain
shift LDCs from recipient to partner in growing world

Few farmers (in developed world) due to scientific advances but in Africa families still need to grow own food so can’t do science or …
Thomas Malthus
Norman Borlaug
revolution in food growing > increase in population
rising food prices due to biofuel usage of arable land
may not make sense to send food surpluses to LDCs, instead to convert to biofuel crops
plus environmental impact of clearing land to grow more biofuel inputs

Post cold-war
Nunn & Lugar (CTR – Cooperative Threat Reduction), and Soros – science/scientists in post-Soviet Russia
(Soros – library assistance program) (CRDF – civilian research development foundation)

State has ~30 AAAS Fellows
Example: Rao, phd in molecular bio, post Soviet biological warfare manufacturing facilities > biotechnology for disease surveillance, public health … biosecurity engagement program (Asia & Middle East)

Example 2: Dehgan, redirecting Iraqi weapons scientists, virtual science library (run by DTIC, I think? hm, she says CRDF but I thought DTIC – maybe 2 projects? or 3 including programs from the publishers themselves?)

Gates – World Economic Forum 2008 in Davos
Connect people who know about breakthroughs with people who know needs of developing world

Jefferson Science Fellowships
(tenured professors)
example: Awadelkarim (from Penn State, originally from Sudan)

All problems have a science aspect
can help food problem (thus free people for science, etc)
- by gm crops – more productive, use less water – help water problem
- contemporary molecular methods required to work these problems
Example: BT corn
- all good, no problems for butterflies (really?)
- but banned many places due to disinformation (really?)

Q&A
Was there discussion in gov’t about impact of biofuels policy on food market?
A: gov’t view is that biofuels policy is only a very small part of food prices
her personal view: 2 factors- 1) neglect in investment in ag 2) china and industrialization, rising affluence – more meat eating which is less efficient also biotech hasn’t had as great a positive impact as it could

My Q: disconnect between access to the literature (which we’re already doing through many different programs) and doing good on the ground
A: open courseware (but needs internet), programs between universities and African Universities and organizations to: train professors, work together on problems, and do training on the ground

Q: global warming impacts poorest the most, please talk to the students, about studying global warming related policies when the current administration is known for being negative/hostile towards science (from George Mason professor)
A: her bosses appreciate the importance of science, has been some investment in global climate change, but there are important roles for science policy specialists in State and USAID – although those two organizations have traditionally been generalists

BTW - Reminder, I'm still a committed liblogger

2008-04-01T11:05:00.004-04:00

The low frequency of posts here is not an indication that I have nothing to say (if you know me, you'll probably smile at that), nor that my interest in blogs or blogging has waned -- I am simply trying to get my head back above water in work, school, and life so blogging frequency has dropped.

I believe fully in libr* blogs and in information science blogs... and I'll try to hold up my end of the biblioblogosphere more come summer.

My love hate relationship with scripting...

2008-04-01T10:43:00.003-04:00

It's sort of beating your head against a wall - it feels so good when you stop! :)

I took programming in college, Pascal actually (I'm old), but just one semester (it's where I met my husband, but that's another story). I'm sucked in by thinking of problems the way you have to to get a computer to work with them... Programming poses really intriguing puzzles that are very attractive to my mind... But I remember the bad, too. I remember that I am not detail oriented and that the frustration of trying to get my program to compile and getting it submitted into the online drop box prior to the deadline felt like it was going to kill me. Literally, I remember my chest hurting and panicking because I couldn't find a typo... (it was the same or worse with Mathematica which I had to use for diff eq in the days before pull down menus and guis)

In the (mumbled) years since then, I've done a little javascript for the web, and of course some html... I built some search plug-ins... and I've become a little more fearless in trying new things (like R when the rest of the class is using STATA or SPSS).

So for my current independent study, when the professor who is supervising me suggested using a Perl script to grab the data from the web, I said sounds good... and here we go again. Turns out that Perl is actually much easier to understand than I expected so I've been customizing the scripts she's written to pull urls from files and write to files and for different types of blogs. Searching with regular expressions (I'm not a super hero there, yet, but my professor is)... And obsessively running and rerunning the program trying to make it do everything I need and not get bogged down in various situations... to the exclusion of other work. Sigh. Christina, drop the keyboard and back away slowly :)

But, on the other hand, I never expected to get this knowledge out of this independent study, so that's a real plus.

I get to go to DTIC, yay!

2008-03-21T09:12:00.003-04:00

I'm so excited - I love DTIC - the folks who work there do a great job and provide a valuable service. They have an annual conference, but usually other people from MPOW go as their only conference and I don't go because I go to SLA and ASIST. I hang out with a bunch of military librarians at SLA, and I know they're disappointed that I don't attend the DTIC conference, so this will be a chance to catch up with them, too, and learn more about what's going on right now.

Susan Fingerman and I are going to be presenting Wednesday morning, from 9am-10am in one of the breakout sessions. Here's our blurb:
Online communities, specifically, Communities of Practice, are a key tool in support of information sharing. But they are not “fire and forget.” For a community to be successful and provide sufficient return on investment, it has to be carefully and thoughtfully designed and maintained. Further, when designing communities intended for scientists and engineers, it is important to take into account the research on information and communication behaviors of these groups. In this session Christina K. Pikas will discuss the information behavior of scientists and engineers, good practices for online community design. Susan Fingerman will discuss practical concepts relating to the design of Communities of Practice within an organization, and provide some real-life examples from her work at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

If you want to go, looks like you can still register. The plenary sessions on Monday and Tuesday look awesome, but I have to catch up on work so I'll only be there Wednesday.

To what extent do scientists use social software?

2008-03-09T11:55:00.002-04:00

(first - apology for being so quiet on here - I'm ok, but have sort of a writers' block for the 2 presentations I have to do in the next couple of weeks, the paper that I'm trying to get journal-ready, the two literature reviews for quantitative projects, and the conference paper that's due on the 15th... well and the standard homework and teaching myself R)
( let's actually talk about STEM, but not really clinical medicine, well, unless you want to)

The point of this post is to say what I know about the title, and to ask for pointers for additional information. Ideally, I'd like percentages or some such for various flavors of STEM researchers using each type of social software.

Here's what I have.
From: Mark Ware Consulting. (2008). Peer review in scholarly journals: Perspective of the scholarly community – an international study. Bristol, UK: Author. Retrieved January 28, 2008 from http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PeerReviewFullPRCReport-final.pdf

	Clinical Medicine	Life Sciences	Physical Sciences and Engineering
RSS News Readers	20	21	27
Read blogs regularly	11	11	16
Have own blog or actively comment on others’ blogs	2	2	4
Contribute to work-related wiki	8	9	15
Social bookmarking	7	5	9

From 2006 APS Industrial Membership Survey Final Report September 12, 2006. http://www.aps.org/about/governance/committees/commemb/upload/2006_Industrial_Member_Survey.pdf
5% of Industrial Physicists surveyed read or maintain blogs for social networking

From both Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell, 129(3), 443-445. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032 and Hannay, T. (2007). Web 2.0 in science. CTWatch Quarterly, 3(3) . Retrieved March 8,2008 from http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/web-20-in-science/
Estimates that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 science blogs

Otherwise just sort of case studies of individual physicists, biologists, chemists developing and using wiki software (or even in some cases semantic wiki software). (Into this category go Distler, Bradley, Murray-Rust, etc.)

Personally, I think the APS number is pretty encouraging because I would think industrial physicists would be much less likely to adopt these things than academics and also because they might read blogs and not know they're reading a blog.

Help? Any other stats?

Any better numbers on scientists contributing to or maintaining wikis? Using social bookmarking? Blogs come and go, any idea whether there's a net plus for science?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Bora's Interview with John is Up

2008-02-23T11:48:00.003-05:00

Bora interviewed John Dupuis with basically the same questions he asked me. It's great to really see the difference between a special librarian in a research lab and a librarian in a university science library.

Bora's interview of me has been posted

2008-02-17T13:28:00.001-05:00

In case you want to know a little bit more about me :)

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

2008-02-01T21:57:00.000-05:00

Many science bloggers, in particular women scientist bloggers, choose to be either anonymous or pseudonymous. Sometimes they give the reason that they want to be able to speak freely or talk truth to the man (see). Some have everything to lose if they are discovered, and for some it would be a minor inconvenience because co-workers don't "get it."

Bloggers who have made the choice to provide their real identity sometimes complain that if they were anonymous they could say whatever they wanted without repercussions. This comment from a C&EN article makes the point:

"What you say carries more weight when you put your name behind it," says Paul Bracher, who runs the rabble-rousing "ChemBark" blog. "It's unfair to talk about others without letting people know where you come from, especially if you're going to be critical about other people's work." Mitch Andre Garcia, of "Chemical Forums", says, "Using my real name keeps me more honest, reflective, and judicious with what I write."

In practice, though (and this would be an excellent topic for a qualitative study, but I won't call dibs as long as you tell me what you discover), anonymous bloggers do not really have any more freedom and may even have less freedom for several reasons.

First, because they don't want to be a jerk. Or, well, they might be a jerk whether or not they reveal their names, but I don't think it correlates. (this point I got from Dr. Free Ride)

Second, the more they say -- and everything they say -- can be used to try to discover their real identity. If you are the only woman associate professor of physics researching x then talking about your work will out you. What can you say about your work place? Maybe what coast it's on? That it's big or small? Luckily you can still talk about poor treatment because that happens everywhere (being sarcastic).
mrswhatsit states this very clearly:

When I started this blog, I decided to blog under a pseudonym so I could be free to talk about whatever I wanted. I soon learned that this was not really true. If I really want to stay anonymous, if I really don’t want people to figure out who I am, then I can’t talk about anything that will identify me. That includes specifics about my research (since we’re one of the few labs working on this question in this system). So, from the start, anonymity wasn’t nearly as freeing as I thought it would be.

It takes a lot of work to stay anonymous -- carefully selecting words and re-reading posts to make sure nothing slips, and if you are discovered, that the repercussions won't be too bad.

PropterDoc thinks that you can either post as a scientist or about being a scientist... but her commenters disagree (do read the comments, too). She thinks that if you're just talking science that there's no need to be anonymous -- but that doesn't seem to be the case when you talk to women scientists who reveal their identities online.

Third, women on the internet are victims of very personal attacks. I don't think that being anonymous does anything for this (may even attract some), but it may be easier to distance yourself and it's harder for a stalker to find you. (Lou mentions this, as does Veo Claramente)

So, in conclusion there are some darn good reasons to blog anonymously and this unsystematic look indicates that it does not provide more freedom, rather it chains you a life of walking on your toes. For young women scientists, the freedom of using their real identity is a luxury they can't afford.

Bloggers build trust with their audience over time - isn't it refreshing to judge someone on what she posts rather than her institution, her h-factor, or her recent paper in a big name journal?

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin' don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free, no no
And feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
You know, feelin' good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee
(by Kris Kristofferson and copied from this Google cached page)

Updated 2/02 to correct 3 typos, on caught by Walt (thanks!), and another 2 I caught.

My ASIST PIM article now available

2008-01-25T14:55:00.000-05:00

I updated the original post, but just in case. At conference +90 days we're allowed to self archive our papers. I put mine up on both D-LIST and E-LIS. This reports a qualitative study in to how senior engineers in a research lab setting manage their personal, work-related information.

Choose your source: D-LIST or E-LIS
(and in the vein of eating your own dog food, so to speak, this will be one of the first things I deposit in our institutional repository when it goes live)

Yeah, but could there ever be enough for replication?

2008-01-22T22:02:00.001-05:00

I'm all about open data - I really need to make that point because I'm sure I come off as critical.

We had a great opportunity to discuss some of this at the session at the NC Science Blogging Conference (1/19). Xan mentioned that the data are rarely freely available, if available at all, and
that this is a problem because the data can be used for quality control, and to support new analyses and visualizations. Of course the problems of format can be overcome, and people are working hard on storage problems.

The discussion bit centered around getting scientists to post their data. Bill thought that congress should mandate it -- to which I reacted really negatively. Holy cow- look at the backlash for making the published stuff available! The scooping issue was brought up (and also in the comments on the Scientific American article and in [1] - the d'oh! moment), too, but all of these overlook a bigger problem.

My points in this post are:
- that it is very difficult, if not impossible to replicate many tricky experiments without a lot more information than is found in a journal article (not the data, but meta info)
- hands on transfer of tacit knowledge may be required ([2] says this nicely, but I don't buy a whole lot of other things in [2] so do not read this as an endorsement of the article)
- it is very difficult to retrieve datasets and then reuse them because it's nearly impossible to capture enough data so that they are useful (this has been overcome in some large astro datasets, but they seem different because the instrument is shared and very well documented - please correct me if this is wrong)
- it's difficult to trust someone else's dataset if you don't know their work
- if data sets are embargoed until the PI wrings all of the papers out of them that s/he can, are they still relevant to other researchers?
- at what level would the data be kept? straight from the sensors/instruments? unpacked/processed? graphed, fused, analyzed?

Certainly meta-analyses happen all of the time and some of these use unpublished data (so that becomes interesting when it shows the bias from publishing only large strong positive results). There are also a few papers giving really paltry response rates when authors are asked to provide a pre/post/e/off-print of an article (I want to say like 30%)

If this can be done at all there are certain things that might make it more likely:
- like with gene databases, bottom up, you must submit your stuff to one of these approved repositories if you want to be published in our journal or be a member of our professional society
- repositories have to be disciplinary -- or really smaller than that -- at the research area level so that the metadata can be tailored to the community's needs. Tons of money has gone into information retrieval from gene databases and some of these other databases might be pretty complicated,too.
- data would have to link to author or research group and articles that used the data
- data would have to be useful (like Jean-Claude's spectra instead of just pdf's of spectra) and stay readable - not a proprietary format, or if so, need to migrate to new versions.
- search would have to make sense
- funding and preservation would have to be steady and long term. It's fine if the data sets are free to retrieve, but then where does the overhead get kept?
- send a ping back to the original author when his/her data is being reused

I am so totally not an expert on any of these issues but I seem to be sitting on an inconvenient boundary between the two areas so I feel bound to try to translate a bit, however poorly.

(actually, I just remembered some librarian discussions about the difficulty of data supplements in astro journals... hm, maybe that did get figured out with online? maybe not? still hard to find?)

[1] Birnholtz, J. P., & Bietz, M. J. (2003). Data at work: Supporting sharing in science and engineering. GROUP '03: Proceedings of the 2003 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. 339-348. DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/958160.958215
[2] Shapin, S. (1995). Here and everywhere: Sociology of scientific knowledge. Annual Review of Sociology, 21(1), 289-321

Update:
1) discussion wrt Hwang case and peer review and cloning... replication hard and expensive, still want to look at the data see: http://blogs.nature.com/reports/theniche/2007/06/how_can_journals_improve_peer.html
(so the up shot is yes, make data available but not necessarily for the purpose of replication -- which I think everybody pretty much goes along with)
2) new research on peer review, reviewers think it's generally a good idea to review the data but are not terribly excited about doing it themselves, see: summary paper, toward the end http://www.publishingresearch.net/PeerReview.htm
via

Kent County (Maryland) Also Leading the Way

2008-01-22T16:58:00.000-05:00

(via a *Florida* librarian!)
Yay, Kent, the first library system in Maryland to pick Evergreen! Kent is much less populous and more rural than Howard (which has chosen Koha) so I think this might even be a bigger deal. There's more on their process on their blog: http://kcplinnovations.blogspot.com/

Google and open data

2008-01-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/dataset/index.html
(via Carol on SLA PAM Division listserv)

hm.

NC Science Blogging Conference Wrap-Up

2008-01-20T13:29:00.001-05:00

Now that I'm home I thought I would post a quick summary of the conference. (BTW- I keep getting strange things when I visit the wiki site - like really old versions of the pages and something was written over one of the pages)

First, it was very well organized. Some conferences run by for profit companies or professional societies don't go this smoothly! The hotel was close and reasonably priced. My room was very nice, and the hotel went out of its way to ferry people around and make sure we had what we needed. It would have been nice if the bar had been laid out so people could socialize and congregate, but that's really pretty minor in the course of things.

Sigma Xi was a great host ("zi" if anyone else forgot their Greek). The center was very attractive and the wireless was great. The food was fabulous (the pulled pork with the NC-style sauce, oh and the cole slaw and the hush puppies, and the locopops ... amazing, now I'm hungry again!).

The goodie bag of swag was packed full. The bag itself was from the local museum and unlike some from other conferences, I'll probably use this frequently. I have enough science magazines to last me for a while, and a business card case, a massager, a USB laptop light, a beautiful coral reef calendar...

The dinner beforehand, the drinks at the bar both nights, and the socializing between sessions were all very useful. I really got a chance to talk for a while with scientists in many different research areas as well as with other interested parties such as science journal editors, PBS consultants, ethicists, gender studies-interested scientists, other science librarians/information scientists, scientific software engineers, museum workers of all sorts, writers... They taught me a lot about what they do and how they use their blogs. With all of this, there is still a need for a ton more research on how scientists blog. Also, what it means for a scientist to blog for an organization, event, or experiment. I really need to get my article edited and submitted to a journal. I want to dive back into another study on the topic, but I'll have to figure out what it should be next. (btw- Tara's article on science blogging has not been published yet, I was afraid I'd missed it. I'll link when it's out)

As for the actual sessions - they were great, too. It's unfortunate I could only be one place at a time. The marine research one actually reminded me of something I'd heard from other bloggers and also something a book author I was sitting next to at dinner mentioned: blogs are a great place to put the extra stuff - stuff that is in excess of what's needed for a journal article or a book or a film, or maybe stuff that isn't enough for a journal article or ... So maybe I should say what I mean by that. Eric Roston will be using his blog to put out a lot of information he found for his forthcoming book, The Carbon Age. Really good stuff, but it just didn't fit into the book. Likewise, the marine researchers go out on extended cruises but sometimes only four papers result. One thing they will do is to communicate with land-based researchers to get their guidance on things - like if they don't have that flavor of expert on board. Now they can use blogs for sort of mini reports of new science. Things that maybe aren't enough for an article, but are still the results of cool research. They can post these things very quickly, too.

We didn't resolve in this session what the difference is between live and real-time blogging, and we didn't figure out what the difference is between blogging for an organization and for yourself (I think most agree that blogging for an organization should still be only lightly controlled and not be overly restricted).

A theme I can't support that I heard at the end of the conference is that science bloggers should go full time and they should be paid to do nothing but blog-- I think some of the best contributions come from scientists who get material through their research, their reading to keep up in their fields, and their attendance at professional conferences. I really think this should be in addition to other forms of communication. With that said, I think we still should try to actively recruit unheard voices. We need many more scientists in all research areas to really establish this as a new way of doing business.

Unfortunately, there are many disincentives for female and underrepresented group scientists to blog at all, even more so with their real life identity. I don't know how to help this - at all - but I think we can learn something from the adoption of other ICTs. Big things need to happen to fix the face of science - but it's a chicken and egg thing, too. Visible female and underrepresented group scientists will recruit more, but the low percent that exists have too much riding on being seen like everyone else, or better than everyone else, to perhaps actively recruit... don't know. Luckily Pat and Zuska (and others) are on the case. I'm sort of building up a backlog, but this would make a great study (women and science blogs...)

As far as open data goes -- this is huge right now, and plenty of computer scientists and librarians and archivists (a special flavor of librarian in case you didn't know) and discipline specialists (bioinformaticists, astronomers, etc.) are on the case (with some help from NSF funding). There are several issues related to culture (getting people to contribute, learning what people need to be able to trust and reuse data), information representation/organization, information retrieval, and data structures required for such massive piles of data. There are also preservation issues (migrate the data, what format to store it in, etc). I totally support what J-C is doing but I also think that if many, many labs do this, we'll need some better way to search and organize than google (IMHO). BTW - I also feel pretty strongly that it is the wrong way to go to look to Congress for a mandate for open data! (ok, if you are a scientist and reading this, do you want Congress to force you to publish your hard-earned stuff and then have all of the Canadian, British, German, etc., scientists dine out on it without sharing their own?). It has to come from the relevant international professional societies and journal publishers, sort of from the bottom up, and so that it impacts everyone with interests in that research area.

The closing session on framing and the science debate was not well done and that's too bad because there was a large audience who were prepared to listen. By presenting the information on framing poorly, they probably lost some support instead of gaining support. As for the science debates, well, it's hard to see how they would make a difference. AAAS has gathered the statements of the candidates and that stuff is pretty telling. So I'll leave this for now, but I will try to weave in more thoughts in future posts.

NC Science Blogging Conference: Adventures in Science Blogging

2008-01-19T15:53:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Ouellette

Where is science going?
The way we never were: anti-social geeks
we are: scientists, educators, writers, students, other
She's gotten a lot from her blog.

we have a lot of strengths including personal voice, opinionated...
but there are some concerns: no accountability, comment trolls...
ostrich effect: people only listen to views that agree with theirs

more and more science bloggers and bloggers from msm, etc. blogging now gets you noticed by msm. but there are still some universities that state that they will hold blogging against junior faculty in tenure decisions.

(she sees a need for more professional bloggers -- i disagree. I think it's precisely the people who are active in their discipline who write the most interesting blogs/posts)

(argh! open access <> electronic -- she said that we need open access so we have electronic access ARGH!)

audience:
- D. S. - I don't need or want to be paid for blogging
- someone - institutional reasons to support their scientists blogs
- H. - it's more than either no or tight oversight, there can be some middle ground - someone checking in from time to time and bloggers being considerate of their employers
- science writer vs. science blogger is not a real distinction
- indy media - neither msm or blogs (fills in the continuum)
- the accuracy and expertise of the science bloggers is overlooked - generalist journalists are not able to do the same
-we do have some voice on msm newspaper sites as they now link to blog comments (using technorati or sphere)
- q from online, about getting tenure

(very sleepy and a lot skeptical and a little cranky so take this all with a grain of salt)

NC Science Blogging Conference: Open Data

2008-01-19T15:40:00.000-05:00

(I don't know what the exact title was)

Xan Gregg

reproducible, archived, prevent/detect fraud

survey of journal authors
- “available upon request”
- “… with qualifications” (pay, for qualified researchers)

example American economic review data policy
“authors … that contain.. must provide.. sufficient for ..”

benefits of published data
ex: climate change, “more guns, less crime”, better visualizations
quality control, better analysis, better visualizations

how to publish data
raw, plain text, xml, sql database, datasharing sites (many eyes, swivel, wikis)

Jean-Claude Bradley
real time, using a number of tools, to get to open notebook science

walked us through his blogs and the types of posts he makes
- announcing collaborations
- local news
- results
- shipping products
- some science philosophy

blog links to wiki entry for experiment which links to chemspider, methods info, raw data (spectra, etc)

comparing experiments

log system
(results centric view, so that if you drop the vial then everything up to that point can still be used)

people are using his stuff (know through analytics)
- troubleshooting their own experiments

also discuss failures

(I needed to plug in so from here we talked about scalability, findablility, the feasibility of mandating deposit of data)

NC Science Blogging Conference: Gender and Race in science

2008-01-19T12:21:00.000-05:00

Gender and Race in science: online and offline
SF (Suzanne Franks, moderator), KV (Karen Venti, science to life), PC (Pat Campbell, fairer science), SW (ScienceWoman)

Starting off points from the blog
PC – in response to Summers, why is the media not covering this, why isn’t there more info on women in science
- guidance from journalists and from other scientists on talking to the media
- wonderful community of women in science
- how to we use women in science blogs to get more girls interested in science – use advocates to promote the blogs to the students
- science carnival (for women scientists) theme this month on telling stories
- blogs have helped her connect with younger women scientists

SW (and minnow)
- science womanofesto (about being a woman and a scientist, and being married and a grad students), starting conversations (see on her blog) (5/11/2005)
- she gets a lot of benefit and feedback, she is a student of gender studies and she learns a lot
- she gives blogs an hour a day to read and write, but she gives so much because she gets so much out of it, especially starting a new job and moving
- audience has changed blogging, and she has become more targeted as she has blogged more
- advice – think about your style beforehand. she’s found that she can do either woman as scientist or do the actual science

KV (grad student, intends to go into science writing)
- her blog is about science and life and for her to get experience writing science for the public
- why with tons of female scientists, why aren’t more blogging?
- advice – just do it, talk to other science bloggers and get some help and just get started

Audience questions
- pseudonyms, assumption that male
- some males with female pseudonyms and vice versa

self-censoring if you’re blogging under your own name
- even if pseudonymously still self censoring (both to maintain anonymity and to maintain blog-life boundaries and to not be a jerk and to present the right social identity of several)
- in the case of race and ethnicity, there might be not enough people to even maintain anonymity so can’t be part of this larger community and get the support that might be built in for majority scientists and students
- if have a job, have to censor further

Maybe science bloggers in the open are more likely to be tenured and out there already.

Maybe scientists think that they’re objective and don’t appreciate racial, gender, etc., lenses (lenses my word).

blogging vs. just being a woman scientists
- can find others like you when you can’t in your local area and can get support

difficult to find African American and Hispanic scientist bloggers

KV- as a grad student, has a PI who is very supportive of what she’s doing, and who wants to increase representation in science,

can women get ahead in science by becoming more visible, because they may be better writers and can have popular blogs

SF- woman’s studies does provide knowledge beyond “anecdotal” this is what I experienced, so there needs to be respect for gender/race things that are results of systematic research (my words: even if qualitative or ethnographic paradigms)

PIs could read what women are experiencing and make sure that they use it to learn and treat women better (I did not capture this thought)

Issue on magazines getting information out there about gender and race issues when participants are not willing to come out and be quoted.

NC Science Blogging Conference: Real-time blogging in the marine sciences

2008-01-19T12:13:00.000-05:00

Real-time blogging in the marine sciences. Discussion leaders are Kevin Zelnio, Karen James, Rick MacPherson, Peter Etnoyer and Jason Robertshaw.

On deep sea expeditions sponsored by NOAA, including real-time video transmitted from UUVs. Scientists on call – if the limited number who can be on the ship, but they can call scientists ashore who can look at the real-time video and then help the shipboard folks decide what to gather or look at more closely.

Got together in small groups to talk about what real-time blogging is, when it’s useful, and what the difference between real-time and live?
- someone from NC marine something (sea grant) or other (how to convince organization worthwhile, maybe not useful for everyday live, but for special events)
KJ – how do we know how are blogs are used and how they are valuable? very limited statistics, very few comments
RM – problem of organization vs. personal, blogging for the org, then become an official mouthpiece, NOAA people can’t comment per policy
- blogs are more than just opinionated diaries
PE- it’s important to put boundaries when you start out, (likes the idea of an event blog), gets more bang for the buck of the event
JR- hard to control the message when everyone has a cell phone and can report
KJ - scientists have personalities – but this has been under wraps
Folks from museum of life scientists – tried out in house first, then to membership, now to public... skeptics could see that it was ok. People think that what they do isn’t interesting, but it really can be.
Real time vs. live
- same?
- thought out vs. stream of consciousness

someone from nc17 – you think you don’t have something to say

How can we measure the impact of blogs?
- page views?
- can’t measure knowledge management
- can’t measure unless you have a purpose – so you can measure wrt a goal
- shouldn’t be all top down for measurements, if a kid enjoys a post maybe that means something more

what about corporations seeding comments and trying to sway the conversation pro industry
- example from mining near extinct vents (?), comments from scientists contracted to support mining operations caused them to be more careful – still outspoken but more careful

Maybe a use of the analytics are to understand how many lurkers – comments aren’t the only thing. This is sort of an old thing because politicians for every letter there are 100 people who feel the same way

RM- perceived value of providing a real time account. What are we adding by telling you about a day in our life.
What does this value then add to the awareness of the science. And how does that compare to value of peer reviewed paper or polished science program.
PE- maybe only 4 papers from a whole trip, but there is a lot of left over material, maybe not worth a whole paper but very interesting

CP- maybe we underestimate the recruiting purposes
KJ – yeah, and for all of science by making it seem accessible and done by real people.

concern from scientists that it will take away from peer reviewed work, and take away respect from

Jennifer (Shiftingbaselines) something to say about professional journalism and “vulgarity of narcissism” - risk of blogging, journalists do a real job filtering and making scientists look good – maybe the blog becomes about the personality and the science is lost

CP- maybe room for both
KJ- but the blog can also become raw materials for reporting

Lisa- community content manager who blogged about a positive experience, and then his post was published in the

Larry - Science education – emphasis on science as a process (not facts handed down from on high), real-time blogging could be really great for this

KJ- real-time blogging maybe can serve later to resolve controversy or for archival purposes.
RM- interesting that people are coming back to older posts

Pamela- uses scientific blogs in the classes (undergrad), a blogger she knows and who does good work, they can then read the full article alongside the blog and understand more.

KZ- pitfalls as real time bloggers?

KZ- how to make relevant
Roy- so much information, but hard to pick out and find the nuggets of info

CP – maybe carnivals and reviews have a fuction here?

Pamela- but who is the audience for the carnival? some are very heavy duty what’s new in science now.
KJ- comments that her blog is too hard for someone.. so what about jargon both of field and of blogging, also how do we avoid “vulgarity of narcissism”

NC Science Blogging Conference: Dinner

2008-01-18T17:56:00.000-05:00

A bunch of bloggers met up at the Town Hall Grill in Chapel Hill. Many of the groups got lost getting there. I'm glad I picked up a car full so I didn't have to try to figure that out on my own!

Once I got there, it was great. I sat with a couple of authors of science books and learned about their work. I also sat by an online educator.

The food was fabulous: salad with a roquefort dressing and bacon, mahi-mahi over fried chipotle polenta, and then banana pudding for dessert (the real stuff!).