| Personal Health: Weight Index Doesn’t Tell the Whole Truth Body mass index may be useful for identifying obesity in large populations, but in individuals it doesn’t differentiate between fatty and lean tissue. feeds.nytimes.com |
Blog carnivals and the evolution of blog communities | GrrlScientist Blog carnivals are online electronic magazines that are administered and published on a regular basis by blog writers themselves. They played a significant role in the evolution of blog communitiesImage by wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).I am preparing to publish the latest issue of the blog carnival, Scientia Pro Publica (Latin for "science (or knowledge) for the people"). Since you may not be acquainted with the history of blog carnivals and may not be familiar with them, I thought I'd tell you what blog carnivals are, introduce a few influential carnivals, explore the changing functions of blog carnivals and discuss how this has affected the evolution of the blogosphere itself. Blog carnivals are online electronic magazines that are administered and published on a regular basis by blog writers themselves. The first blog carnival was published in June of 2005. Published every week on a semi-regular basis, this seminal carnival was (ironically) named The Carnival of the Vanities due to the notion that blog writers would overwhelmingly nominate their own material (although reader nominations were also welcomed). A subset of these nominated essay links are then selected by the host to appear in the current edition of the carnival, and then its publication is advertised to the public. Originally designed to collect and link to excellent writing on any topic published within the previous 60 days on public blogs, The Carnival of the Vanities ended up providing much more than that to its thousands of readers. The central idea underlying The Carnival of the Vanities was so popular that it immediately spawned a rapid and ever-increasing number of blog carnivals, most of which are centered around a particular topic or theme. Just a few short months after The Carnival of the Vanities was published, the first blog carnivals devoted to science writing - The Tangled Bank - and to medical blog writing - Grand Rounds - first appeared and were huge successes. (Unfortunately, The Tangled Bank is now defunct, but both The Carnival of the Vanities and Grand Rounds are ongoing.) The Tangled Bank and Grand Rounds are just two examples of the large number of theme-based carnivals that provide topical blog writers with an easy way to find, read and comment on each others' writing. People are social animals, so it was inevitable that blog carnivals would lead to the formation of informal communities of blog writers who focused on particular themes and who typically wrote carefully-considered and -researched essays about those topics. Some of these blog writers became friends and even met each other "IRL" (in real life) - sometimes amusingly referred to as "meat space". I think it was the blog carnival "idea" and its execution that led tothe formation of loose, informal blog communities that in turn provided much of the cultural and sociological groundwork necessary for the successful launch of formal topic-oriented blog communities, such as ScienceBlogs.com, that occurred several years later. At this time, blog carnivals are a mature institution within the blogosphere, so their usefulness to established blog writers is probably limited. But that said, blog carnivals have not lost their usefulness. Indeed, they are an important gateway for the growing number of readers, especially those who are relatively new to blogs, to begin exploring the variety and quality of blog writing that is available "out there". Carnivals are also a valuable way for the growing numbers of "young writers" to gain real life experience and feedback necessary to improve their skills and to refine their writing styles, regardless of their chosen topic. Thus, it is my opinion that blog carnivals provide a critical stepping-stone for the writers of tomorrow to develop and hone their skills today. Sadly, the popular general-purpose science, environment and medical blog writing carnival, The Tangled Bank, has been defunct for several years now. My attempts over the period of one year to relaunch The Tangled Bank were unsuccessful so I instead started Scientia Pro Publica in early 2009 and published the first edition in April of that year. Like its predecessor, Scientia has been quite successful, and has attracted an informal but very committed community of supporters who host their edition on their blog site. Some of these hosts have already become recognised as "big names" in the science and medical blogosphere in their own right. Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling or migratory blog carnival where each edition is published on a different blog host's site, and all editions are indexed and linked from the Scientia Pro Publica home site. It is usually published every two weeks, on a Monday, with the intent that busy scientists can devote part of the preceding weekend to reading and selecting which essays to include, and can use their poetry or Photoshop skills to create whatever poems, graphics (or whatever else) they wish to personalise their edition. Ideally, each issue of Scientia links to 25-35 selected essays about a variety of topics within the sciences, maths, medicine and environment. After the school year commences, the numbers of submitted essays often increases to 60 or more, so to ensure that the chosen essays are still read, the carnival is then published on a weekly basis, generally between October through December and then again between February and June.But Scientia Pro Publica is not merely a "relaunch" of an existing good idea: it is a reinvention. More than just providing writers with a venue for showing off their best writing, the purposes of Scientia are to provide readers with access to an online electronic magazine that regularly links to and promotes good science, environment and medical writing throughout both the blogosphere and twittersphere. As such, blog carnivals are the one place on the internet designed specifically for the purpose of connecting readers and writers so the reading public can help young writers improve their craft for their targeted audience. So you, the reader, are actively encouraged to leave your comments on the linked essays that you read, telling the writers what they did well and what they need to improve upon. In view of the rapid evolution of the media, it is entirely likely that your feedback will play a vital role in developing the science, environment and medical writers whose newspaper stories, magazine articles and books you will be reading in just a few short years. So that said, it is my hope that you will be ready to read the links that will appear in the upcoming issue of Scientia Pro Publica. Oh, and the blog posts linked in these carnivals are usually damn good reads too.GrrlScientistguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Video: George Carlin on religion and God | GrrlScientist The brilliant comedian George Carlin shares his thoughts about God, religion, prayer and Joe PesciIt's back! Sunday is God-mocking day! In this classic video, the brilliant comedian George Carlin (12 May 1937 - 22 June 2008) shares his thoughts about God, religion, prayer and Joe Pesci.GrrlScientistguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
I can't bury my hatred for Antiques Roadshow any longer | Jonathan Jones It may be a national treasure, but Antiques Roadshow is an advert for a sleazy industry in which people only want to make a quick buckThere are some rages buried so deep that you forget to verbalise them. Irritations that you take for granted, and somehow never get around to complaining about. This is how it has been with my contempt for Antiques Roadshow.This ever-popular television programme was a fixture of the Sunday evening schedule when I was a child, and indeed still is. It is part of the furniture, a fine old Chippendale cabinet in the corner of the room. Attacking it feels like smashing your mum's cut-glass vase. But it is high time I did.Last week an ancient Roman helmet, only discovered a few months ago by a young man with a metal detector, was sold at auction for £2.3m. The museum that hoped to get it was outbid, despite raising an impressive sum. To add insult to injury, the buyer has remained anonymous – in other words, this remarkable piece of British history (see my blog last week for why it is so special) is being spirited from public view to an undisclosed place, one supposes behind closed doors.Reports in the press have focused on the fact that the money made will be shared between the man who dug it up and the farmer whose field it was. Concern for the fate of a beautiful and fascinating object that logically belongs in a British public collection has been eclipsed by the narrative of treasure-hunter-gets-rich. Buried treasure has dazzled the media. The Antiques Roadshow view of the world has prevailed.It is any wonder we are confused about the value of old art and artefacts?The show looks so comfortable, so British, and so superficially cultured. Its army of experts can identify the style of a forgotten Canadian painter or a lacquered syringe case from the Opium Wars. But there is more than meets the eye.Most old things lying around the house that someone thinks "must be worth something" are worth nothing. Yet week in week out, Antiques Roadshow presents the viewer with golden fables of art and money.It is curious to see so many people pretend they are there out of pure historical curiosity, only for eyes to light up when a good price is quoted – or go dull when the fascinating find turns out not to have a huge financial value. You can almost picture Great Uncle Albert's letters from the trenches being chucked out of the car on the way home when it is discovered they are not a gold mine, just history.There are much healthier approaches to archaeology and history on television. The popularity of programmes that dig up the past is terrific – and it has nothing to do with dosh. The Time Team don't hold a car boot sale at the end and sell off the stuff they have found. But Antiques Roadshow is an advert for a sleazy industry. The antiques business prospers by turning heritage and culture into a racket. It turns us all into money-grasping cynics who would sell Magna Carta, given half a chance.MuseumsArchaeologyHeritageTelevisionArtJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
[press release] New space research settles years of scientific debate New space research published this week (Thursday 21 October) in the journal Nature, has settled decades of scientific debate. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have found the final link between electrons trapped in space and the glow of light from the upper atmosphere known as the diffuse aurora. The research will help us understand &lsqu... antarctica.ac.uk |