Two quote from the Science Online 2011 website summarizing the conference.

Summaries of important points and comments made by the speakers and audience for this session:

Chris Mooney

·         How do we correct misinformation?

·         “How I Started Worrying and Learned to Doubt the Blog”

·         Internet is second only to TVF as source of information about Science and Technology

·         Brendan Nyhan – people did not change their minds when presented with corrections that challenge their ideological point of view

·         Cultural Cognition of Scientific Facts (Kahan et al): conservative libertarians were more likely to accept an article on reducing pollution when it included headline about nuclear power.

·         “What Happened on Delibaration Day” Case _____

·         Correcting George Will: “no global warming for more than a decade” bloggers tar and feathered him, Washington Post recognized the outrage and WMO wrote letter correcting him, but Will did not apologize or correct himself.

·         Message First, Facts Second

Joshua Rosenau

·         Blogs can’t correct Texas Textbooks.

·         School Board science standards  1998 review “strengths and weaknesses” but they only wanted to review weaknesses of evolution.

·         Texas Freedom Network, texasteachers.org, Teach them Science, NCSE

·         Reach people with documentaries about Kansas, and convince them to speak at meetings.

·         Audience Research: talk about medical advances from evolution, compatibility of faith and evolution

·         Start Online, Move Offline.

·         Make it hard to be dismissed: state why your opinion matters (member of the community, scientific background)

·         If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a big enough coalition. – Bernice Johnson Reagon

Val Jones

·         Science Based Medicine blog.

·         80% of Americans go online for health information, but only 20% consider the source.

·         Case Study of Two Patients going to two different online sources for health information.

·         True story: colon cancer survivor who found oncologist online, breast cancer who tried alternative medicines and died in six months

·         Getbetterhealth.com

Comments:

·         November 1963: Malcom X Black Revolution

·         Margaret Sangers: planned parenthood

·         Meam Goldman: talked about birth control when it was illegal

·         George Will is into Toaster oven science, not real science. (look up article where George Will says he loves science)

·         Van: academic centers need to set up social media centers. Shout down crazy people.

·         Create peer-to-peer references that people can link to in response to people being wrong in comments sections.

·         Van: Health Blogger Code of Ethics

·         Astrology News: Astrologers said It’s true, but it doesn’t change any of the results. There’s a reason it doesn’t change any of the results.

·         Mooney: quick heuristics to determine whether to engage someone, politely say, “I don’t want to have this conversation.”

eBooks and The Science Community

Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, David Dobbs, John Dupuis

Different perspectives. Author of ebook, someone writing an ebook, and librarian with books that don’t go up on shelves.

Carl Zimmer

·         wrote first book in 1998. eBooks were the future, but vanished with dot-com bust.

·         eBook graph is skyrocketing while publishing is used to slow gently declining graphs.

·         Smashwords: publish and distribute books.

·         Put together an ebook as just a book, text: OR put book together as an app.

·         David Eagleman – example of book with media

·         Marcus Chown – Solar System ebook

·         These super dynamic ebooks are not books, they aren’t linear, they are encyclopedias with articles.

Tom Levenson

·         “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

·         After Gutenberg invention there were millions of books, before there were only thousands.

·         Gutenberg Moment: explosion of data

·         Birth of book trade, birth of audience, new occupation of writers.

·         Becoming of the Books – recommended book on the growth of the book trade

·         Emergence of copyright law.

·         Half of books were religious, ten percent were law, and ten percent were science.

·         Each development in the media has unpredictable impacts on the genres and creative expression.

·         When you get cheap paper, you get newspapers and pulp novels.

·         What new genres will emerge from the ebook? ME: A hypertext document. Collection of quotes, links to authors and indexes.

·         Appbooks are a different medium. ME: But they are no different from websites.

·         Book isn’t dead. There are niche books. Cory Doctorow sells books in all different mediums.

·         We are at a Lumier Brother’s stage in app books, it’s enough to show simple tricks, but that won’t last, we need to go more substansive.

David Dobbs

·         Writing a regular book, but is also working on an app book version of it.

·         Slider to change gene varables to watch genes turn on and off.

·         Illustrations eliminate words. Books has words, which get eliminated in the app.

·         Different marketing versions of the book: basic ebook  $10, app book $15, cheaper modules $3

John Dupuis

·         Will spend $100,000 on ebooks this year, mostly computer science and engineering.

·         Authors and publishers are often suspicious of librarians because their job is to provide access to content to people who can’t afford it or won’t pay for it.

·         What is the ebook business model? It will go the same route as the music industry. People will still pay for books, but in an itunes model.

·         What’s the sharing model for apps? It works on your ipad now, but what will it work on 10 years from now. Will historians of writing be able to access the Elements a hundred years from now.

·         Apps allow monetizing every reading transaction, and that is evil.

Questions:

·         Nancy Schuler: writing ipad text for National Geographic, love you graphics designers

·         ME: Google Android version of books?

·         JA Konrath: making money with DIY publishing

·         Comment: I don’t want you wasting time working on apps if it detracts from your time spent crafting good writing.

·         

These are notes summarizing comments made by speakers and audience during this session:

• Are you a geek? When telling a story, how often do you elaborate on the details? Baseball stat geek, science detail geek, D&D geek, all about details.
• What actually constitutes a geek?
• Student: it’s good to be a geek, it means someone who is passionate about something.
• Student: Geek is starting to be glamorized. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter movie.
• Radio Show Host: compares herself to scientists, and doesn’t think herself a geek, but the audience is geeks (Skeptically Speaking). Considers herself a translator. Geeks listen more closely to the show, and send emails. Geeks provide feedback.
• “You call it geekery, I call it passion.”
• Geeks distrust social niceties. Why aren't they just giving me the information straight? Tendency towards argumentation.
• What are Benefits and Pitfalls of a Geeky audience? Bonus is passion. Geeks get immersed in details, and have a self-generating energy and will keep working through things left to their own.
• Geeks don’t see correcting others as a slight.
• Accuracy VS Completeness: don’t ever say false things, but you don’t have to get totally immersed.
• Geeks are obsessive enough that they will voluntarily seek out details on their own.
• How to delineate between being too geeky and not geeky enough? Keep things entertaining as a means of keeping people with your content. If it’s entertaining, people will stick with you through the sciency parts.
• Make sure your headline and introduction are not for geeks, but you can geek out later in the story. Skeptchick uses humor to open all posts, post about Twilight.  Scicurious has posts that reach out to her audience, Friday posts about sex.
• Catchphrases and Inside Jokes create communities, but they also put up walls to communities.
• Surprise people with a story, ask a question to pique curiosity about how it will affect people personally,
• Whatstheharm.net – anecdotes. Turns on non-geeks, but turns off geeks because we want data. What’s the difference between whatstheharm.net and Rush Limbaugh using anecdotes to hurt science?
• Snark: a way of building a community, but causes pile-ons, turns off outsiders, PZMeyers’ fans attack whoever he points them too. Snark is the nature of the Internet. Radio difference: no snark rule.
• Use snark to empower the weak against the powerful. Use it against trolls against power.
• Try going with a private comment first before going public.
• Remember that it’s the internet, your tone doesn't communicate in the text.
• Don’t do threaded comments.
• You’re going to offend someone. Radio got called a Marxist for her show on gender. 

Notes from the various online projects presented in this session.

Karen James

Galapagos Live http://galapagoslife.wordpress.com

·         Survival Rival – teens compete against each other to make Darwin videos, winner goes to Galapagos.

·         Darwin Online: searches against all of darwin’s writings http://darwin-online.org.uk

·         Wanted girls who won the contest to recreate Darwin’s experience, taking notes, but doing so online and uploading photos.

NASA STS-133 Launch Tweetup http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup

·         Nasa has over 30 twitter accounts, astronauts tweet live from space.

·         People sign up for tweetup, 100-200 are selected, and get a front row seat to the launch

·         http://justin.tv/nasatweetup VAB - Vehicle Assembly Building

·         Commander of Shuttle is husband of Gabriel Giffords

·         Follow @nasa and @nasatweetup – will post link to signup

·         Follow #nasatweetup

ISS Wave http://isswave.org

·         Heavensabove website: give your location and it will tell you where to look to see the ISS in the night sky

·         @twist will send you a tweet when the ISS will pass that night.

·         Wouldn’t it be cool to coordinate a mass wave at the ISS around the world. Created a map of people waving at the ISS over the holidays.

·         ISS goes around every 90 minutes. Need to see it right at sunset to get the reflection of the suns rays.

·         Maybe schedule one for Yuri’s night, this year is the 50^th anniversary (April ?DATE?)

Sophia Collins

I’m a Scientist http://imascientist.org.uk

·         See Stacy Baker’s Presentation

·         Students appear to get invested in scientists, rooting for them the way we root for designers on Project Runway.

·         Student’s ask scientists any question they want.

·         How hard would it be to set this up with Joomla or Drupal?

·         Go to website and look at archive from last year: 6,400 students asking thousands of questions.

·         Kids get engaged because of the reversal of power, students get to ask the questions and students get to decide which scientists get to move on.

·         60% of students went on the site in their own time at home.

·         Scientists got into it, staying up late making videos

·         Scientists can come from anywhere, students are primarily from UK, but other schools can apply

·         Majority of scientists are academic

Kristi Holmes

VIVO http://www.vivoweb.org

·         Semantic web platform to highlight scientists areas of expertise and interests.

·         120 people at 7 different institutions working on it.

·         So much information, vivo filters down to meaningful results

·         Harvests data from verified sources, uses RDF triples

·         For collaboration, finding resources in academia,

·         Did a search on biomedical informatics, got a list of potential collaborators

·         Profile with data from PubMed, coauthorship record

·         Each institution maintains their own data, allowing customization to the institution and what’s meaningful to the organization.

·         Open Source: see sourceforge

Adrian Ebsary

Peer Review Radio http://peerreviewradio.com

·         Interviews with scientists based around a theme, subjects are given questions before hand

·         Encourage students into journalism, teach them writing skills, train students in web design and sound editing skills

·

These are general notes summarizing comments from audience members and speakers for this session:

• Taking pdfs extracting text and semantically marking them up, hyperlinking reference lists to their source articles.
• Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
• http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/computer-and-information-science/
• Citations have no meaning the way we use them now.
• Most papers aren’t cited, long tail graph (zitiny  ziphian curve graph?)
• Citation Graph, collaborative filtering,.
• Citations need context. How will that happen? Need to know why something was cited (ie. Disagreement).
• We don’t disagree with papers, we disagree with claims made in papers. Why can’t a citation point at a place in the article?
• Question: Is reference extraction beyond the scope of any non-commercial company? Mendeley is a company.
•                Answer: There’s no single source of open bibliographic data.
• Sage, SocialSciences,Crossref, webofscience, google scholar, etc – how useful are these sites. They provide metrics and recommendations, but not much more than going directly to the journal.
• Social Networking in article recommendations, connect content to people, conversations around papers, systems don’t encourage conversations, people don’t want to participate.
• Criticism of Mendeley: algorithms shoudl be open, academics should be able to define their own algorithms
• Mendeley's plan is to extract reference data and make it publicly available and machine readable.
• Criticism: academics need an open bibliographic data set.
• Need to explain type of citation: positive vs. negative citations, valence terms, sentiment analysis/machine vs. human curated
• Ontologies don't capture all reasons someone is citing something (ie. "Cited because I work for this journal." "Cited because Darwin will make you think I'm smart." "Cited because teacher required five citations.")
• References are separated into their own section, removing them from the text. Unlike links, which are immediate.
• Peer Review: example of a reviewer rejecting a paper because it didn't cite his own paper.
• People need to make use of the REL attribute in HREF tags.
• Citations can be used in a tribal sens, citing people in our camp and excluding others.
• Description of citations as "frozen footprints in the snow"
• Why do we need 1,000 citation styles?
• Librarian: Questions about citations styles from students are constant and frustrating.
• Orchid: cross-company effort to standardize citations.
• Let people write citations however they want, but add an identifying number.
• Mendeley is developing an open-source citation style editor.

Summaries of comments made during the science art session by artists and audience members:

• Hawks – interested in reconstruction, detailed realism, Neanderthal terminator, there is a tradition in anthropology of illustrating, Neanderthal are reconstructed to look doomed and confused, like it when illustrators and artists bring humanity into them, humor, Kenise Brothers give smiles to them, pose them, which isn’t scientific because we don’t know these things, but also more scientific because it isn’t so clinical
• Orr – orogenic.blogspot.com geometric, abstract illustrations of birds
• Links ot other artists on the wiki page: Carl Buell, etc http://scio11.wikispaces.com/Science-Art
• Radiohead/Nine Inch Nails Model: put a lot free stuff online in hopes of eventually being hired to do something custom, people expect images for free
• Criticism of Mellow's Darwin painting: the steps were too linear, it should have been a bush growing out of his head
• Svpow.wordpress.com – fantasy images of brachiosaurs, not scientifically accurate, but memorable. Brian Ang.
• My Favorite Anthropology Sculpture of Homo Erectus at the Hall of Human Origins - post a link to this image in the wiki.
• The monkey rising to become man iconic image is really wrong and hurts evolution’s image outside of the field. Mitochondria is another example, in cells they are not blobs, but are networked.

Five types of science-art with links to the examples.

These are various notes from session hosts and members of the audience during this session:

• www.blueearth.org – neat wave effect on the site.
• Escaping the Ivory Tower – photography publicizes work.
• We create visual narratives about ourselves on facebook.
• It’s important for people at organizations to take their own photos for people to use. The photo is the first thing to catch your eye.
• Strobist.blogspot.com – light tutorials, photoshop and gimp for post production,
• Graphitti archeology project – photo documents the evolution of walls over time. Scientists photograph environments, documenting change.
• Neil _____: building a community of science photographers
• Online photography community is enormous, amateurs who want to take photos but don’t know what to shoot.
• Naturescapes.net
• Birdphotographer.net
• Bugguy.net
• Bloggers think of photographers as collaborators.
• Photos illustrate, convey ideas, create visual representations of concepts
• Kids might not have professional cameras, but it’s good to get them taking photos with their phones as a means of getting them into photography.
• Gigapan Project: a camera robot takes thousands of photos, which get stitched together and allow you to zoom in for incredible detail
• What’s the best image? Steve from Scientific American: If you can get a shot that gets rid of 400 lines of copy.
• Science in the Triangle writer: break out of the average, learn how to use the camera and turn off its automatic feature
• Zenfolio – more professional photos
• Should writers do the photography, or should they collaborate with photographers. Photographers can miss things the writer thinks are important.
• “The best camera is the one you have with you.” – the photographer’s maxim
• Deviantart
• Istockphoto - $1 to $10 photos
• Discrimination Learning: everything looks the same at first, pay attention to the images that interest you to become more distinguished
• Fillflash – use it, good for evening out shadows, especially at noon or in bright light
• Caption images in your head as you take them.
• Stories Behind the Greatest Photos in Sports – HBO documentary
• 365 Project – take and post one photo a day for a year
• Visualscience at discover website
• Theartofscience.posterous.com – photos through microscopes

Various notes taken from the conference session on science education with Stacy Baker's biology students:

• Jack – into games, not many learning games out there. – homeVSschool technology use: what’s allowed in the different contexts, home is about socialization, school is about productivity, need to intersect the two. (Media needs to relate to him, technology, chemistry “New Social Network of Atoms Creates New Compounds”)
• Michael – into vlogs, recording things on a research boat – students want hands-on activities, looking for internships, homeVschool: school tumbler account and home personal tumbler account to distinguish uses of productivity and socialization. PLoS was a great resource.
• Carl – into Classroom blogs, likes tumbler sciokid.tumblr.com. Baker sends opportunities all the time and preparing for scio11. Was inspired by Baker showing him how people around the world were seeing her website
• Paul – into wikis, allow students to express themselves, science online wiki, Proj: you have to put yourself out there, read newspapers and follow links to find things, NYT and Wired, (Interest: be interesting enough and esoteric as well, be terse without complicated jargon)
• Naseem– into science literacy, how media , nature blog (Adult readers) rely on word of mouth for students to find the blog
• Samantha – encourage more student blogs, students communicate at  a level appropriate to other students, Green Science, global warming, (What about Adult readers) adults can still read her blog, but she is targeting her
• Alexandra – believer in personalizing education, more into humanities, used podcasts and youtube, youtube.com/vlogbrothers, - teenagers want to feel like they are doing something, they want to participate and contribute. homeVSschool: the more competitive college search gets, the more she uses her laptop at home for educational purposes, looking for opportunities to improve chances of getting into colleges, MSNBC, Google News for facts, This Week in Tech Podcast, Relatability (how something relates to me) is important for having something catch her eye, Carl Zimmer cut to the chase about Duck Mating by calling it Duck Sex
• Justin – blogging, using blogs in a variety of ways in science learning, frogs with the citric fungal disease and blogged it
• Rachel Ward – chemistry teacher, using online tools to make the classroom a more exciting place
• I’m A Scientist, Get Me Out of Here: imascientist.org.uk, website where students chat with scientsts and vote for their favorites, least votes get evicted, connected students in remote areas to scientists around the world, allows quieter students to participate more in class discussions, what about when scientists give wrong answers (they should say “I don’t know”), why isn’t there a USA version of this? (Kiome Jarrets: People need to complain. State by state engagement)
• Shanahan – research online science communication, science education professor, works to get students interested in science, reduce their fear, arsenic life story, had students choose a blog and follow it for a month and write a book report on what the blog was about and a lesson sequence for future classes on the blog, students found science blogs were interesting, easy to understand, students used blog the same way they used books and magazine-no engagement no using comments, need bloggers who will give students an interactive experience,
• Audience Comment: everone is trying to find balance between professional and personal technology use, separating and integrating.

A summary of points from this conference session about portraying scientists in fiction and getting science facts right:

• Hollywood blockbusters carry so much weight, need to get more science into this medium
• Scientists need to be telling their own stories. There are only about 120 books about scientists.
• What does it mean for a story to accurately portay science? Getting scientific facts right? Or scientists reacting in a way scientists should react? Believes stories are about people, making them more important than the facts.
• Star Trek: Starhip Mine: “terrorists steal MacGuffin juice from the warp core” Barrion sweep on the enterprise, but barrions are in all atoms. LOL Cats as up and down quarks. Maybe the Barrions in ST were exotic sub-space barrions. We can use the episode to teach proper science.
• 2012 had a ridiculous premise, but the scientists were awesome.
•  Michael Crighton: Climate Change book was silly, Andromeda Strain was silly
• Jennifer: Percival’s Planet, example of good science story about the discovery of Pluto
• Science presented without scientific process is just magic.
• "Tron Legacy" was awful, but for me Tron, had Unix commands, mentioned genetic algorithms, I got much more enjoyment out of the film than the average viewer. Would including something about the game of life or evolving programs through natural selection make the film more interesting? The screenwriters were obviously familiar with the concepts, why did they shy away from giving the film more depth?