If you’d like to contact me to talk about science, science communication, or whiskey, see you on Twitter.

Hot on the heels of my diatribe and others, Genomic Repairman has a post up about it, where he opines about the obviousness of the numbers game, the non-novelty of the whole situation, and several examples of the general hopelessness that we feel when we know we need something to change, but just aren’t quite sure what something is. One tidbit caught my eye:

So what are our options, to keep on keeping on or train less of us. Okay but if there are less of us, who is going to do the work? My boss isn’t rolling up his sleeves and going back into the lab. Maybe hire some of us reformed trainees as technicians, but that costs too damn much. That option pretty much was the first to get jettisoned overboard, not unless the NIH chips in with some type of mechanism to help fund career bench-level scientists.

Absolutely right, in parts. I mean, my boss sure isn’t going to roll up his sleeves either, and not because he wears short-sleeved shirts all the time. I don’t think that “train[ing] less of us” and PIs doing bench-work are the two choices we are dealing with here. Here in my little herd of grad students, we have been knocking heads together on this subject with reckless abandon. Our chat-babbles have simultaneously proved our ignorance of a great many nuances of the conflict and also made it clear that we trainees need to be invited to the peace talks, for real.

But while GR discounts the possibility of creating more technician jobs in lieu of trainees, we keep coming back to it as one of the most viable solutions. A short summary of our current ideas:

1. Reduce or cap the number of trainees and mandate this as part of funding (because $ talks, yo).
2. Put a strict limit on foreign student enrollment so that wily PIs don’t just fill our spots with robot labor. This starts to get dangerously close to economic isolationism, but you don’t solve a problem like this by just hiring migrant workers (especially if you aren’t going to make their path to permanent citizenship, PhD students and postdocs, easier).
3. Create some sort of professional master’s degree program, or something that is akin to a highly trained, semi-autonomous technician that is not part of a PI-track job path.
4. This one’s pretty out there, but award the damned degree based on what the person actually deserves. What if your graduate work was truly judged on its merits, and you could be awarded one of two degrees in the end. Tell me that wouldn’t light a damned fire under your ass! I’ll leave that one be for now, and maybe we’ll return to it another time.

I think #3 is a key. We keep coming back to it in our (inexperienced) discussions. It worked for the medical field, creating physician’s assistants. That job class keeps medical productivity up without creating a glut of M.D.s with a finite number of employment options. Yes, a pro-M.S. would cost more than a grad student. The economics of lab management are going to have to change for this system to work. That’s obvious, and we had better just get used to the idea. But if everyone’s economics are shifted to a comprehensive New Way Forward, then I have no doubt that we can adapt, and probably with close-to-current funding models. Is the productivity of a lab really hinging on the use of $20-30K in salary? I hope not.

When you cap trainee enrollment, some lower-tier and lower-funded institutions are going to have some tough choices to make. But if we are going to make the tough choices about the number and type of Ph.D.s we are producing, then East Bumwillow Technical College just might not make the cut when it comes to balancing quality with job availability. Those closest to me that I’ve discussed this issue with agree that quality research managers are really what we need to be creating with Ph.D. degrees, for academia and beyond. And if the aforementioned East Bum Tech is handing out Ph.D. spots just so they can sustain a source of income as a low-tier research institution, maybe it’s time to rethink that. I’m sorry if that’s your alma mater.

This isn’t a question of university endowment penis-measuring. It’s a way to focus the Ph.D. degree on making exactly what we need and no more. And the rest of the people and schools who want to do research? Quality personnel and research will win the day, funding will be available, but it just might be more masters/technicians doing the work and less Ph.D. students.

So if you were anxious, like GR was, about whether you’d make the cut when we reduced the Ph.D slots, relax. We shouldn’t take  away spots that already exist. But the New Way Forward is going to help us get our Major League talent ready for the big show, and if we’re lucky, we can create a great minor league system by creating a research economy by using professional technicians. Think of it – a job that allows talented, creative scientists to have steady employment working on and publishing exciting research. They just won’t be “doctors”.

Oh shit. Am I Major League Talent?

In recent weeks there has been a ton of newfound attention directed at how US Ph.D. programs are structured. Are they doing what they are intended to do? Are the numbers of doctorate degrees being awarded realistic when compared to available jobs? Does the system need an overhaul, or worse, a complete re-design from the ground up? Are they merely black holes of scientific feudalism where the dreams of so many young talents are sucked in and destroyed, like distant supernovae? The NIH has even convened a review panel to address these questions from the top($)-down.

Well, I don’t have the answers to any of those questions. But I do have lots of opinions about them, some anecdotal and some grounded in data. But does any of that matter?

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in a large program funded primarily by NIH research grants. Frankly, I feel like it’s semi-dangerous for me to express my feelings, and I’ve thought long and hard about writing this. Backlash, the permanence of the internet, being a “complainer” . . . I know all about these risks. And like everyone, I am conflicted in that the system is producing great science and scientists, it just doesn’t seem to be serving all of its students and trainees effectively.

You know what I noticed about the NIH review panel? Everyone on it is an “insider”, meaning that none of them are graduate students or post-docs. That’s not a surprise, because who would put grad students or post-docs on that panel? But I also noticed that none of them seem to represent grad students or post-docs either. I mean there’s a couple of deans, but I won’t try to be funny by pretending they speak for the workers. Regular Cesar Chavezes, eh?

Have you ever seen a labor discussion where the labor wasn’t represented? That whole football lockout thing? The workers may be very rich athletes, but they have reps. Countless auto strikes? I seem to remember something about the UAW. Look up a labor battle (because that’s really what this is, right?) and try to find me one without worker representation. It’s unfortunate, and I wonder how much change we can expect if we aren’t invited to the table. They say they plan to “gather input from the extramural community, including students, postdoctoral fellows . . .”, but to me that sounds like a SurveyMonkey email in the making. We aren’t at the table, we’re at the kids’ table (although I would love to be proven wrong).

Think about that . . . we are primary stakeholders in this conversation, and yet we wield no power in its eventual outcome. What are we gonna do? Strike? Unionize? I don’t think so. We don’t even know what we want, just that we don’t like what we see.

We are the vassals whose fiefs need reforming, but most of us are rather nervous about rocking the boat or too naïve about the scale of the problem to offer well-formed opinions or suggestions. I’m no different. I know that my understanding of the Ph.D. workforce as it exists today is incomplete. I have never run a research lab and I don’t know the intricacies of convincing the government to give me money to underpay an army of 35 year-old post-docs so that I can make it to my next renewal. I am not an economist, and I don’t know how to analyze supply-side vs. demand-side labor arguments. Frankly, I don’t even know exactly what I want to do with my Ph.D. when I get it (although it better let me use these comm. skills, yo).

I certainly don’t feel satisfied in the prospects before me. I don’t look highly on the option of being 35 or 36 years old and still making $35-38K a year after spending 10 years in college (and college-plus). I don’t think a <10% chance of grant success, few risk-friendly funding opportunities, and having the age of tenure review line up dangerously close with the average age of first NIH grant are very peachy prospects. “Research freedom” is a good thing, as is the comfort of tenure, but those get pretty fuzzy and dreamy when you compare them to the real life sacrifices and risks we have to go through to get there. Cost/benefit is one concept I do get.

It’s easy to feel discouraged when you’re the one rowing the boat with a whip cracking in the background, though. What do the PIs think?

I can only relate anecdotes from a recent sample size of n=2, but I think they’re worth mentioning. After discussing these recent announcements in the presence of two faculty members (also in the presence of beer), here’s paraphrased versions of the reactions I got:

• Faculty member 1 – Male, middle-aged, tenured, Chinese immigrant: “I knew that the only way I was going to come to the US and be successful was to be better than everyone I knew. I worked longer and harder than everyone around me so that I could get a job in the US and become a professor.”
• Faculty member 2 – Male, young, in tenure review, moved through Ph.D. and post-doc to faculty as fast as anyone can: “If 1 in 11 of people getting Ph.D.’s are getting faculty jobs, I’m surprised it’s even that high. This is like baseball, you have to be the best every day, work harder than everyone around you and do beyond what you think it takes just to get a shot at the big show. You have to be like Tiger Woods. Not everyone is going to make it, and this is how we pick out the very best of the best to become faculty.”

The “genius mentality” . . . also that you have to be cut-throat competitive and never stop working for the future. That made me think, and I don’t know where I stand on it now. We can’t hand out faculty job opportunities to everyone who comes through a Ph.D. program, and I see how making a system intensely competitive can shake the cream to the top. But something about this doesn’t feel 100% right to me.

I think most (ok, many) of us rowing the boat have the potential to be successful professional researchers, but we have to be more than cogs in the research factory on the way up. The Tiger Woods mentality will find you some geniuses, but it will also lose you a lot of really smart people that might decide they’d rather play on Wall Street or in the ER because they have a better chance at owning a car from and in this decade. I don’t think it’s right that 90% of the people I get my degree with won’t be professors, but 100% of us are being trained to do only that. Most of all, I feel like the incredible diversity of genius, intelligence and skills that our research students possess should be channelled into a multitude of innovative jobs, not force-trained into one. I have met so many people gifted in teaching, communicating, writing, critical thinking, art, design, ethics, management . . . the list goes on. A Doctor of Philosophy degree can help anyone skilled in those areas be a better thinker and a deeper explorer of the world around them, but we aren’t giving today’s Ph.D.s real chances to create a new world of value out of their degree.

Are we training the minds of tomorrow with the system of yesterday?

I’ll admit I do feel a bit discouraged sometimes, and that probably fuels my worry. What Ph.D. student doesn’t, from time to time? But those feelings should be directed at an experiment, not at the entire outlook for the future of the degree we chose.

I’m interested to hear what my fellow grad students think, and what junior and senior faculty think of it too. This may, in fact, be baseball. And there’s no crying in baseball. But there is a whole lot of coaching, and we need it right now.

Seriously, beards on fans, beards on drummers, beards on guitarists, beards on DJs . . . beards everywhere. There was even a beatboxer named Beardyman. You show me a band without at least one beard and I will show you a liar. Incidentally, one of the best was sported by my good friend Kent from the band Letting Up Despite Great Faults:

I’ve never been able to grow a beard, thanks to my fair-haired Northern European ancestry. Scientifically speaking, it really just means that my dermal papillae don’t produce enough 5-alpha-reductase, which isn’t my fault.  Instead, I produce what could best be replicated by gluing patches of thin, patchy stubble to your face with the lights turned off.

Naturally, since so many cool dudes in bands sport beards, I have always been a little bit jealous. Or maybe until now. I recently stumbled upon an Ig Nobel-winning work of microbiology from back in 1967, when men were men and being able to grow a beard was a prerequisite for owning property in 13 states*.

Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men, Appl. Microbiology, July 1967

Although I am far from the first to critique this research, I could not overlook the obvious symbolism of finding so many musical beards and this paper in the same week.  We must again ask: Does a bearded scientist put his friends, family and coworkers in danger solely by possessing full and lush chin hair? Is a face-blanket a potential carrier of infectious microorganisms from bench to bedside? A few isolated cases of Q fever had then been confirmed as a result of handling the laundry of exposed laboratory workers, so a resurgence of beards in biology was certainly worthy of scrutiny at the time. The authors made their hypothesis very clear:

“After many years of absence from the laboratory scene, beards are now being worn by some persons working with pathogenic microorganisms . . . [I]t has been our policy that beards are undesirable because they may constitute a risk to close associates.”

I think the true beauty of this research lies in their two-pronged approach to the question.

In the first series of experiments, the authors tested whether certain exposures and beard-washing methods could influence the persistence of bacteria in the hirsute neck-jungles of four volunteers (two of whom were also authors). These men sported oddly-age-specific 73-day-old beards and were sprayed with two different types of bacteria: Serratia marcescens and Bacillus subtilus var. niger. Two intervals of beard-washing analysis were chosen for the study. Notably, the short interval was designed to simulate “. . . the time necessary for a man to complete a laboratory operation in a zealous attempt to avoid loss of an experimental series despite a known accidental contamination of his beard,” because only the truly zealous among us would jeopardize the safety of our friends and facial hair to complete an experiment. The subjects were then subjected to various beard-washing techniques, which could obviously only be adequately described via the following figure:

Post-lavage, various collection methods were employed to analyze the persistence of microorganisms on washed and unwashed beards, as demonstrated by these captured Taliban fighters:

Analysis of the reported bacterial colony counts leaves no doubt that bacteria survive quite diligently on a washed beard when compared to naked skin. It is worth noting, however, that one would effectively need to dip one’s beard in a bacterial culture to obtain the exposures used in the study. You have been thusly warned.

Bacteria are not the only dangerous microorganisms common to the modern laboratory. In order to study the ability of infectious virus particles to be transmitted by beard, the team employed a set of methods that can only be described as groundbreaking . . . or insane. It turns out that in 1967 you could purchase natural hair beards from Piscataway, NJ (I must wonder, who was donating these?).  One of these beards was placed upon the face of a mannequin and summarily doused with Newcastle disease virus prepared at high titer. The scientists then stroked live baby chickens across the beard to assess viral transmission. This resulted in perhaps the greatest photograph ever included in a scientific manuscript:

Chicks dig beards

Unsurprisingly, when a live chicken is rubbed across an unwashed beard containing a lethal titer of avian viral particles, then ground up in a blender and injected into fertilized eggs, the rates of survival are not good. Beard-wearing scientists must take care to ensure that they do not repeat this extremely precise and odd sequence of events, lest they ruin dozens of perfectly good eggs. The authors came to the conclusion that “a bearded man is a more dangerous carrier than a clean-shaven man because the beard is more resistant to cleansing”. However, I have been unable to come up with a realistic laboratory scenario that could result in a high titer of deadly virus being sprayed directly on a man’s beard without either killing him or destroying the lab, so I am forced to come to a different conclusion than the authors.

In 1967, the United States was undergoing what could be described as “extreme cultural paradigm shifts”. This was evident in more-than-minor historical events such as the Civil Rights Movement, Free Love, and Vietnam War protests. It is not completely unrealistic that a health and safety office stationed at the Fort Detrick Army base would hold Bearded Americans of the Counterculture in low esteem. It is common knowledge that the more liberal and progressive elements of American culture at the time were pretty high on beards.

A clearly subversive individual

So maybe there was a cultural undercurrent to this study, intentional or not. It would serve the purposes of “The Man” quite well to have some scientific basis to reject the beard and its associated underpinnings. Then again, we must consider the off chance these scientists were well aware of the tumultuous stigma of the beard in the U.S., circa 1967. One could imagine this study as a well-crafted jab at the white, male establishment of government-funded institutional science by a small group of intelligent rabble-rousers. It would certainly be an effective poke, and one that I think still resonates today.

Have today’s tables been turned? Scientists are now so often perceived as the ones acting in opposition to American values. There’s an interesting double standard there, when you think about it. As I observed last week, beards are considered pretty damn cool when it comes to musicians, and people love musicians. Perhaps we can all overlook the inherent infectious disease risks of science beards as claimed by Barbieto et al. and, by increasing their frequency, increase the acceptance of scientists in today’s society.

Whatever the case, I still can’t grow one. At least I have a full head of hair to fall back on. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some 5-alpha-reductase to order from a south Asian online pharmacy.

*Not actually true.

This post was originally featured as a guest blog on LabSpaces on March 28, 2011. Special thanks to them for hosting me!

Thank you to everyone who has passed on a note of encouragement or a personal story to Sarah. My current plan is to assemble any notes or videos together and show her as soon as I can. She’ll be amazed to see how many people share her interest and encourage her, especially all of the women who have responded. As long as her mom and dad say it’s okay, I am going to get her reaction out to all of you too.

It’s really nice to see the internet assemble for forces of good (like Operation Birthday Boy last year).  I hope everyone can take some of this positive energy and direct it toward a young person in their own life. The best influences in science are personal ones, and the battle to make tomorrow’s scientists great starts with each one of us.

Keep spreading the word, and thank you all! I will assemble notes and videos until I visit them next, and I’ll keep you all updated.

OMG!!! I adore and love science! I have learned landforms, mountains, volcanoes, plains and oceans. I love science because everything is real. So so many things can happen. My favorite thing about it is pretty much everything! Also without lakes and rivers I would have no water to drink. That would be outrageously horrible! – Sarah, age 7

This quote was uttered by my lovely niece, Sarah, during her parent-teacher conference last week. She’s a second-grader from San Antonio, as bright as they come – polite, creative, curious and very nice to her sisters.

Apparently, at her school the parent-teacher conferences are done a little differently than I am used to. Instead of it being a somber progress report between just the parent(s) and the teacher, the student is invited to be there, to hear feedback on their own work and to present a summary of the coolest thing they have learned that term. And “OMG! I love and adore science!” is what Sarah chose to write, all by herself. Now, I am not going to lie, I think the backyard chats about the difference between mushrooms and plants could have something to do with it. Or maybe it was the light meat/dark meat conversation at Thanksgiving last year (she always wants to sit by me).

Whatever the reason is, my heart is warmed by those words. I know how many of you with children have seen this kind of reaction time and time again, so you probably know the mixture of pride, awe and worry that I feel right now. Why worry? Because it is well-known that young girls (compared with boys) lose interest in science between the ages of 9 and 14. I just can’t let that happen to someone so bright and with so much potential.

I think it’s a great first step to provide someone like Sarah with positive feedback, right there in front of her parents and teacher, so that she associates what sheloves to do with something that is encouraged. But overcoming the stereotypes that are behind the drop in interest (not ability), I just don’t know what the best plan is. Ideas?

It’s certainly important that someone like Sarah is exposed to scientists so that she sees that they don’t exist as the stuffy lab-coat types that children are famous for drawing. I am doing my best to help out here (Uncle Joe is pretty cool, if he doesn’t say so himself). More than that, though, I have been fortunate enough to meet and interact with some truly inspirational scientists, male and female, young and slightly-less-young, through my involvement with the World of Science Online. So here’s my idea, and my promise . . .

Do you want to help, any of you? If you’d like to send a message to Sarah, an email, a video, a picture, a story . . . anything, I promise that I will deliver them to her personally so that she can know how many fun, interesting and inspirational guys and gals are out there doing science and loving science. Just leave me a comment, if you’d like, and she and I will be eternally grateful.

We let opportunities pass all the time for connecting to the next generation without even realizing it, and I don’t want to let that happen with my niece. I want her to know how cool it is to be interested in science, so she can realize her ability. Even if she doesn’t become an astronaut, it will be one more bright, female mind that loves science, and that’s good for all of us.

It’s why I named my blog what I did. It’s Okay to be Smart!!! If you don’t feel like sending a message to Sarah, well then go and find a young person and inspire the heck out of them right now!! Do it! It feels great!!

Here’s some other highlights from the Tumblr-sphere this week:

Folks on Tumblr got pretty excited to hear about the supposed E.T.’s in meteorites, but when that proved to be bullshit the network really helped get the word out and keep good science safe.

More awesomely funny crap after the jump . . .

Ant hills are just enormously awesome underground structures, as proven by these folks who decided to pour cement down one and dig it up.

That’s Carl Sagan as the Old Spice Guy. ‘Nuff said.

#Hipsterscience happened (and is still happening). It’s pretty giggle-worthy, and now with pictures.

Puns are always funny. Right?

And now science has its own “Science-Major Mouse” meme. More hilarity can be found here. Thank goodness for the internet.

See ya! Keep giving love to the microblogs!

It struck me while reading the fallout that despite how savvy, talented and productive many internet science communicators are, very few of them have embraced true microblogging. Ed Yong has a Posterous, but, uh . . . that’s almost all I could think of.  I realize that most science communicators are on Twitter, but I don’t really view Twitter as a microblogging tool anymore. To me it has become a social news and information stream.  Beyond that, barring the occasional hilarious hashtag, a single tweet is more often a link or a comment than it is a stand-alone piece of content. Microblogging, rather, is best represented by sites like Tumblr and Posterous.

So why do have so few people in the science community embraced microblogging? I guess that the simplest answer is they don’t know it exists. Or don’t care. Here’s how most conversations go when I tell people I have a tumblelog (that’s what they’re called):

Me:  Yeah, I have a Tumblr page that I run. It’s really fun.

98% of People: What the f&%k is a Tumblr?

Me: …

(this actually happens)

Trying to explain what a tumblelog is to someone who has never seen one is like trying to explain a giraffe to an eskimo. Even after I describe it, people either assume that it’s like emo-Twitter (which it’s not) or that it’s like a starter blog for tweens (which it also is not).

Maybe I can use some examples to show you the value of these new blogging tools, and why they should (?) matter to you:

Tumblr used to have a feature called the directory, where you could submit your Tumblr site under some heading (like animation, or design) and then have your friends recommend you every Tuesday, effectively bumping you up the list. But the truth is, no one really used it to find new pages, and no one’s page is about just one thing. Two weeks ago they launched the EXPLORE page (capitalized due to its obvious importance). Instead of a directory, posts are curated based on tags, and popular content is bumped up in real time.

“But wait! Isn’t that just like Twitter? It’s a real-time news feed, too!”

True, Twitter is a feed. But it is a complete gonzo-feed. Without curation, almost incomprehensible. Go ahead, start a search for the hashtag #science on Twitter. It’s garbage. Useless. How does Tumblr do it differently? They employ teams of actual human editors (for no pay, of course, only the honor) to curate the topic for which they have been hand-picked by Tumblr staff. Here’s the result. The major distinction is that finding good content through Twitter seems to be highly dependent on who you follow, whereas on Tumblr . . . content speaks. Nowhere on Tumblr will you find how many people follow a particular user. Quality is the only currency.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works. They say it’s The Easiest Way To Blog (TM)! When you go to a Tumblr page, like mine, you see what appears to be a normal blog format. Fully customizable and built around a defined feature framework (like WordPress).  But a Tumblr user sees something different behind the scenes. Behold the Dashboard:

It’s a timeline of everyone you follow, just like a Twitter feed. But the content is right there, no 140 character limit. Youtube video? Right there, ready to play. Photo and blog post? Right there, in full. Animated GIF of a cat wearing a monocle? Right there, GIF-ing all day long. This is a key feature, because you aren’t clicking link-browser-twitter-link-browser-read . . . it’s all neat and tidy in one place.

Users can “Like” a post, or they can instantly reblog it to their own page and feed, with all attribution to the original source and poster locked in the whole way down. 5,000 notes (the term for likes and reblogs)? You can see everyone on Tumblr who has liked or reblogged that post with a few minutes of scrolling. It’s better than re-tweeting, because the entire history of a post exists.

Ok, so that’s how it works. So what? Why is it useful??

When that NY Times article came out claiming that blogging is on the wane, the main argument was that young people are turning to sites like Twitter to share information. That’s true, Twitter is still growing every day. But 57% of Twitter users are between 26 and 44 years old. It is not the land of youngsters, by most definitions. Tumblr? Well we don’t know their exact user statistics at this point, but it’s safe to say that more than half of users are under 35 years old. And that’s why it’s important that science feel at home over there.

What are we online to do? Why are we here? For most of us who write about stuff like this (science, the web, etc.), I would say it is either to express ourselves or to teach. And if you want to teach someone, who better than young people? The attention span of a young person is short, and they will always respond better to a medium full of rich content and when surrounded of their peers. Long form and traditional text blogging is awesome, and it serves its audience well (I mean, I do both, and do them for separate reasons). But you miss out on one of the largest audiences on the internet, and one of the most important to the future of science, if you don’t go play on their turf.

Tumblr is currently serving up over FOUR BILLION page-views a month over their network (that’s roughly triple the views for WordPress.com), and a vast majority of that is to a younger audience who have sponges for brains. How powerful is this network of connected micro-bloggers?

On February 22nd, I saw a Tweet about some pictures of an abandoned particle accelerator in Russia (I don’t recall from whom, sorry). They were spooky and awesome, and using Tumblr’s instant-share button for my browser, I made one into a post in about 45 seconds. And then I proceeded with my day. Later that night (the same day the “Explore” function was launched, actually), I got on to check my page. I had gained over 1,000 followers in a single 7-hour period. The post made it to the top science post of the day and was on the site-wide radar page for hours.  That post, as I currently write, has 3,819 likes or reblogs. Using out-of-date numbers from an interview with Mark Coatney (now Tumblr’s media evangelist) last year, that means the post was seen by around 1,591,250 people.

A picture. Of a particle accelerator. In Russia. Nothing else I ever write will be seen by that many people. That’s probably true for you, too.

Is that “meaningful science writing”? No, of course not. But when a person is surrounded by their peer group online, and then they are presented with sound science, they will have a positive association with it. Whether it’s a photo, a song, a video clip, a link to an article and a short note from me . . . every small piece of science that people come across when they are in their comfort zone makes science a bigger part of their life and makes them more comfortable with it. I’m sorry to say it to so many talented writers out there, but pages of words just won’t do it sometimes. Not when it comes to just getting science onto the retinas of those who need it the most.

So I hope that more people, and journal and media outlets, will embrace this new frontier. Many of them are already there (and many, many more). I have to ask myself sometimes, “Why the hell does Wired Science or Boing Boing not have a Tumblr?!?!” Traditional blogging can be a lonely island, and the past year has proven how important networks are to even traditional online science writing.

Tumblr won’t replace Twitter, because it doesn’t have its beautiful simplicity and mobile sensibilities. It has a less-than-great record  of server outages (although who could anticipate that growth?)  It also won’t replace blogs, because it just isn’t the optimal medium for traditional long text posts (cough*JLVernonPhD*cough  But it will be important, and I invite you to try it. Sure, there’s an entire page dedicated to Tom Selleck by waterfalls with a sandwich, but hey, that’s fun too. And like any tool, there’s right and wrong  ways to use it, and things that the hive mind do and don’t like.

So there ya have it. I’d love to know what you think of Tumblr and sites like it (although Tumblr has pretty much won the battle of microblogging already).  Are you writing about science on Tumblr? List yourself in the comments and I will add you to my list. A very short, incomplete list:

http://stokedonscience.com/ (@ajebsary)

http://jlvernonphd.tumblr.com/ (@JLVernonPhD)

http://germgirl.tumblr.com/ (Maryn McKenna)

http://scienceofkissing.tumblr.com/#/ (Gallery site for Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book)

(Check the comments for a nice addition of pages from Bora, because he pretty much keeps track of the entire internet!)

Behold, however! I have looked into the future of our Fine Nation should the GOP freshmen and Tea Partiers get their way! Should these esteemed Congresspersons push this through, not only will we no longer lead the way in innovation and intellectual currency, not only will we be forced to buy alternative energy technologies from countries like China, and not only will our children fall even farther behind in STEM education . . .  it might look something like this:

Most of all we won’t have them tar-feathered eggheads from up thar’ on Harvard Square tellin’ me and mah chillunz what this’n here Earth is all about and that we came from a damned monkey! Space is for the aliens, human mankind wasn’t meant to fly thar in a damned rocket tube! Let’s just call global warming what it is – SUMMERTIME and git back to stewin’ up that squirrel stew!

Watch out y’all!

Coincidentally, every watershed moment seems to be given a name, and “KateClancy-et-al-female-scicomm-gate” doesn’t have a good ring to it. Suggestions? Anyway, I found it especially interesting all the men who jumped to defend these women and comment on their plight. It was a true “throwing your cloak over the puddle” moment for the Twittersphere.

Sheril predicted that the enthusiasm would ebb at some point, and being the internet, that has certainly happened. The question that I pose to you is: Now that we are one month on, what have you done about it?

Let me be perfectly clear: I don’t mean to call people out, or act uppity, or make this an “I told you so” post. I honestly just want people to remind themselves of what was discussed a month ago, check your archives, check your tweets, and ask if you have done anything? Think of it more as a nudge and a progress report, because although I am a male, I believe strongly that many of these women are brilliant and interesting, and they should be promoted, in work and online, as much as anyone else.

Have you promoted a blog post by a lady? Have you interacted with female scientists more online or in real life? Have you started following new websites or Twitter friends? Do you even give a flip?

And one more thing. . . I know that someone might go all “pot-kettle-black” on me, so I will start the retrospective right here:

- I have made it a point to repost at least a few “Women in Science” features over at my Tumblr page. Granted, they were rather girl-powerish and superficial, but hey, it’s Tumblr.

- My Austin, TX science outreach program Science in the Pub hosted Sheril Kirshenbaum to discuss her new book a couple weeks ago. Half point awarded because she’s hometown. But we are hosting three more female scientists in the next 6 weeks!

- I checked my Twitter account, and I actually follow and reblog from females over males by lose to 2:1. However, full disclosure, I don’t think this has to do with me being some chivalrous model human being, and maybe something to do with being . . . how you say . . . a young man at heart? Also, like I said, I think the women I read and follow are genuinely awesome and intelligent.

- I wrote this post?

I am interested to hear your progress reports, thoughts or criticisms.

(Ed Yong is obviously exempt from this test since he made this list of female science bloggers, and they love him)