It speaks for itself:
Thanks to a colleague for tacking this up in their office.
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I signed up for my Twitter account about two years ago, and then realized that I didn’t really want to let the world know what TV show I was watching, or what my daughter was having for breakfast. I didn’t see the use until noticing that I could follow news stories in real time, keep up with friends, and get updates from professional meetings. But it was not until I started working on this blog again recently that I realized how many scientists are using the platform to disseminate information and network with each other. Oh, and promote their blogs too. It might just be the timing or my naiveté, but it seems like Twitter and science are in a fast growth phase. Some evidence?:
And this past weekend I had my first, prolonged, real time Twitter discussion on academic science careers. Very interesting, lots of fun, and I picked up some new followers and made a great new contact. But one worry – how do you handle the volume of messages? Now, I feel like if I am not monitoring my Twitter stream, I will miss something. Besides the blogs I try to follow, this is another set of information to keep on top of. So, we will see how it goes. Will I keep with it? Don’t know. But I am looking forward to tweeting from the upcoming Fort Lauderdale eye meeting this May. I thought it was time liven up this space a bit. But the changes are more than skin deep. I have added a list in the right sidebar of my favorite posts spanning some of the different topics that I write about. And lower down in the right sidebar I have a section for Ashland science blogs. These will include blogs by student authors from our science departments, most of whom started blogging as part of my senior capstone course on science communication. I keep reading that bloggers need a niche, a focus that sets them apart from the many wonderful science blogs that are out there. As an integrative biologist my interests span from visual ecology, vertebrate evolution and systematics to protein biochemistry and lens development. But I am also deeply involved in mentoring undergraduate research, trying various technologies in my teaching (both new and old) and have developed an interest in exciting students about their ability to communicate science on the web through blogging. Does this all equal a niche? We will see. I hope you keep reading. This week in my undergrad science communication course my students discussed whether it was possible to change an anti-science, denialist perspective with good communication techniques. There was a mix of perspectives, but one view was that people will believe what they want, and will disregard scientific evidence to the contrary.
In a recent Nature editorial, Dan Kahan of Yale Law School criticizes what he sees as the dominant form of science communication:
One of Kahan’s suggestions is that scientific information needs to be presented by diverse voices, so that individuals can get information from people with similar cultural backgrounds. This point was raised by one of my students as well, who argued that blogging has the potential to set up this type of communication. Young science bloggers in particular may have the opportunity to gain the ears of their friends, and help promote scientific thinking, through their social networks. Your thoughts? Bora at A Blog Around the Clock initiated a great discussion on young science bloggers and why they do not always stick with their blogs. Bora was kind enough to talk about my senior capstone course at Ashland University in which my students start team science blogs to hone their science communication skills. Only one of my former students has kept with their blog once the class was over. So why is that? One former student has commented that they felt uncomfortable blogging on controversial subjects and having their public writing come back to hurt them. And a science journalist friend of mine noted that “the kids stop blogging because, you know, blogging is what old people do”. It’s true that some of my former students share science thoughts on Facebook, but another avoids talking science on FB for fear of being ostracized as a science geek by her non-science friends. The most common comment I read was that without a critical mass of people reading your stuff, there just wasn’t the motivation/guilt to get a blogger over the inertia of writing that next post. I definitely felt this when I started this blog, and I remember the excitement of actually getting some comments. Maybe we “minor” science bloggers, either young or old(er) just need to band together. We can be our own community, encouraging each other to write, guaranteeing that there are at least some people waiting for that next post. So I would encourage you to check out the two blogs below from my former students (and this one too!):
And while you are at it, check out some great student (or recently student) blogs and let them know you are reading:
As I approach the one year anniversary of my last blog post this seemed like an opportune time to break my blogjam (shoot, already in Urban Dictionary). Ironically this past year has been filled with blogging. I currently post actively to four blogs, and as I wrote about a year ago, I have started using blogs as teaching tools in my courses. I am now teaching my Department’s senior capstone course for the second time with a focus on science communication, and have students starting and contributing to their own science blogs. Students in my current Marine Biology and Anatomy and Physiology courses are also blogging, and I started a Science News Blog to promote our science programs at Ashland University. Now you can see why I have been neglecting A Fish Eye View. I plan to post more about this experiment in using blogging as a platform to teach science communication skills to students. But for now I would like to thank Bora at A Blog Around the Clock for mentioning the work that my students are doing. He points out the excellent writing on these student blogs, but asks the question why they do not stick to blogging after leaving the course and graduating from college. This is true of last year’s class, with one exception. I have some thoughts on this that I will share in future posts. I can also ask the students themselves in our next meeting. I invite you to see what our students are writing. And feel free to leave them an encouraging comment.
Of course you do not need a lens to see. The nautilus does just fine without one. But the benefits of a lens are strong enough that they have evolved across the animal phyla, and even occur in at least one protist. The function of the lens is to provide a dense structure that will refract light on its way to the retina. A common solution for making a lens is to express proteins at very high concentrations, especially in aquatic eyes that do not get the benefit of refraction from the cornea. But interestingly, different organisms use different proteins to do the job. And as Darwin would have predicted, these proteins are not created de novo, but are borrowed from other parts of the body. While debates rage about whether the developmental mechanisms to make an eye evolved once or multiple times, the lens clearly has multiple origins. And each time, organisms have drawn from their biochemical toolbox when producing proteins at high concentration in the lens. These densely packed lens proteins have diverse evolutionary sources, but they are all referred to as lens crystallins. Where did lens crystallins come from? Some are basic housekeeping enzymes, others are protective proteins produced by cells when they are stressed and others have more mysterious origins. But many of the proteins recruited to build lenses maintain their original function in other parts of the body, and are encoded by the same gene. That means that one DNA blueprint can simultaneously make a metabolic enzyme like lactate dehydrogenase throughout the body, but when this gene is used in the lens of a duck, its protein product becomes a structural material for bending light. This concept of gene-sharing, where one gene contains the code for making protein with multiple functions, was first proposed to explain the evolution of lens crystallins. Were these lens crystallins recruited because of their original enzymatic functions, or were they simply convenient building blocks for the dense packing required to make a lens? For many crystallins the answer is – both. My lab does research on an abundant lens crystallin family found in the vertebrate lens, the alpha crystallins. All vertebrates contain at least two closely related alpha crystallins that resulted from a gene duplication event near the beginning of vertebrate evolution. When the gene sequences for the alpha crystallins were resolved in the late 1980′s it was clear that they were small heat shock proteins. This family of proteins is produced by cells that are under stress – perhaps because they are too hot, or are encountering dangerously high oxygen levels. So why was a stress-induced protective protein being used to make up to 30% of a vertebrate lens? There are two reasons. First, it turns out that alpha crystallins make great building blocks. You can pack them in at very high concentrations and still maintain the necessary protein fluidity needed in the lens. But second, the same protective function that they serve in other parts of the body comes in very handy in the lens. The central cells of the lens destroy their own nuclei and other cellular machinery to prevent the scattering of light as it passes through the retina. No nucleus means no new protein, so our lens cells must make do with the same proteins for their entire life. Old proteins get shabby, fall apart, and then start sticking to each other. This sticky mess interferes with the passage of light, and voila – you now have a cataract. But alpha crystallins use their stress protective function to prevent this aggregation of old, decrepit proteins, preserving lens transparency until they are used up, generally starting at around age 50 for humans. At the macroevolutionary scale a wide array of proteins have been co-opted as lens building blocks because of their structural and enzymatic properties. My lab is currently investigating the microevolutionary story. How do small changes in alpha-crystallins alter their ability to function at different temperatures, for example? Darwin perhaps sensed that the eye would yield excellent examples of his two great ideas: descent with modification and natural selection. I pulled my head out of a grant proposal writing daze long enough this past week to notice a fellow professor having some trouble with their Facebook privacy settings. Seems that a religion professor at Dartmouth thought it would be funny to point out the verbosity of some of her colleagues. Even better, she worried aloud:
Unfortunately, said professor was not careful enough with her privacy settings and a screenshot of her profile with the above quote wound up on the student newspaper’s blog. She probably joined the Dartmouth network and didn’t realize that everyone on that network could see her page. The Chronicle article points out that its readers would be scurrying to Facebook to check their privacy settings, which is of course exactly what I did. I’d like to think that I am way too savvy to make a mistake like this, but then I googled myself, found that my Facebook page was the second hit, and realized that my profile picture is totally public. I’m not having a Phelpsian moment, but it is a particularly goofy shot of me and my 3 1/2 year old daughter, and not what I want to put out there as my professional face. So I made the picture private and blocked my Facebook page from Google. One other sticky point in using Facebook as an academic. Do you friend students? I came up with some personal rules on the fly as friend requests started to come in. I decided to only friend students after they graduate (or leave my University for other reasons). I feel bad ignoring friend requests from people that I like, but decided to set that barrier between my work and home life. I have accumulated a lot of former students as friends, and hope current students won’t be so offended by the put off that they will not friend me later. And I don’t send friend requests to former students myself. I wouldn’t want to hang out at the creepy treehouse either. However, I have made an exception for former research students, and they have not been too creeped out to accept. If you are a prof, leave me comments on how you manage your Facebook page. I know you have one.
While biologists are sometimes criticized for turning Darwin into an icon, we do owe our fundamental understanding of life to his (and Alfred Wallace’s) once revolutionary ideas. Perhaps no one experiences that fact as much as the practicing biologist. And Darwin was a nice guy too (from Tom’s article):
In another take on the man, Desmond and Moore’s new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, argues that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery was an important driving factor in his work. Critics of evolution try to argue that Darwin’s ideas about human origins support the racist view that some “races” are “higher” than others. But on the contrary, Desmond and Moore argue that Darwin’s view of shared ancestry meant that all human populations are equal tips on the branch of life. Furthermore, Darwin’s abolitionism helped give him the moral courage to publish what he know would be socially controversial and uncomfortable ideas in Victorian England. I’ve been reading a number of reports from the recent ScienceOnline 09 science blogging conference in Raleigh, NC. The Southern Fried Scientist and Anne-Marie from pondering pikaia have some nice write-ups from the sessions they attended. What caught my attention most was a session titled Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond. I am teaching my department’s senior capstone biology seminar this semester for the first time, and am focusing on science writing as a central theme. I started this blog, my first, back in September and have become totally absorbed with the science blogging community. I also have a strong interest in playing with different teaching technologies. So for this capstone course I decided to merge the two. My students are starting their own science blogs in groups of three or four to develop skills in communicating science. I hope that this will also facilitate discussion of what a well-trained biologists should know – another central them of the course. You can follow along with this experiment at our central course blog. My students will have their blogs up later this week, so check back to see our progress. |
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