In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September. Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB power spectrum with Planck, I’ve already eaten a slab of reindeer, ran for an hour up and down the snowy hills, and sweated in a sauna....
Posted by Andrew on April 15, 2008 8:36 PM
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom of course I had never met here on campus. I also met the site’s editor, Matt Brown, as well as blogger Jennifer Rohn, who also runs the science/culture site LabLit. It’s an ambitious idea, and anything that gets us out of our offices and talking...
Posted by Andrew on March 29, 2007 12:11 PM
So apparently this weekend Google, Nature, and O’Reilly Media are hosting a ‘Science Foo Camp’ at Google’s Silicon Valley HQ. O’Reilly has held a few tech-oriented Foo Camps over the last few years, and apparently the list of invitees has always provoked some debate — if you’re not invited, you’re either not important enough, or you’ve somehow pissed off the O’Reilly cabal (like RSS inventor and all-round curmudgeonly presence Dave Winer). Like the tech events, SciFoo is invite-only, and is also run under a rather draconian set of disclosure rules about what participants can report about each other’s identities. In...
Posted by Andrew on August 14, 2006 12:08 AM
Scientists complain a lot about peer review. It’s a safe bet that most of us think that our papers are generally not improved in the process, but in the usual self-congratlulatory way, most of us probably think that we’re in the minority of good referees who actually make useful suggestions, or catch egregious errors. We can’t be right about both, not most of us anyway. Nature, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal across all fields, unquestionably a bastion of the establishment, has decided its time to re-examine the peer review paradigm, prompted largely by the ongoing revolution in electronic publishing...
Posted by Andrew on July 3, 2006 10:19 PM
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