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An experiment in live-tweeting at #soSEA

April 16, 2012

[EDIT, April 19: Here is a much more comprehensive "Storify" of the evening: http://storify.com/scioSEA/sosea-1-shared-science.]

Tonight was the launch of Science Online Seattle (hashtag #soSEA), an offshoot of the annual Science Online conference in North Carolina. I attempted some “live tweeting” (below, in reverse chronological order, so read from bottom to top). It was kind of hard and kind of exhausting, but I did see some value in it. In particular, there was a point at which I wanted to make a comment about publishing in open-access journals, but it wasn’t my turn to speak … so I just tweeted my point instead, thus reaching at least some of those in the room (as well as some outside of it). For those who are shy about speaking up, or who wish to say something immediately rather than waiting their turn, it’s a nice option to have.

* * * * * *

@LizNeeley concludes #soSEA by noting that the hashtag is pronounced “saucy” & inviting us to Big Time Brewery to get sauced! :-)

[RT of‏ @JenEDavison]
.@LizNeeley: @ChrisMooney_ coming into town, will talk about the belief systems of denialists. http://bit.ly/HN7jjm #sosea

[RT of‏ @JenEDavison]
Panelists agree: #openscience itself is part of the answer to the issue of lack of public trust in science. #sosea

[RT of ‏ @scioSEA]
Q from audience: crowdsourcing for tenure review? Gasps from crowd… #sosea

Example: I published on my open-access science song database in BAMBEd, a non-open journal, ’cause that was the best fit for it. #soSEA

… I need to publish in the best journals possible, open or not, to stay alive career-wise. #soSEA

Strong support at #soSEA for publishing (only?) in open-access journals. But until I have job security or am evaluated differently…

[RT of @tomglanz]
“We’re not going to a bad place if everyone is a scientist” @brianglanz @openscience #sosea

[RT of @CyanJames]
@bglanz compares scientists and journalists: we can all do these things, to an extent, but doesn’t think #openscience will get gutted #sosea

[RT of ‏ @kTraphagen]
RT @j_timmer: Interesting question: if all the data’s open for anyone to use, what makes someone a scientist? #sosea

[RT of @michaelhoffman]
.@BrianGlanz: Science Online was originally called “North Carolina Science Blogging Conference” [amazing what can grow from that] #soSEA

[RT of @RockyRohde]
@brianglanz will a blog post read by 1000s hold the weight of a paper read by 100s in future of tenure reveiw? We’ll see #soSEA #altmetrics

[RT of‏ @LouWoodley]
“It’s fun being a dean – all those things you were cranky about before, you can potentially address” @LisaGraumlich #sosea

[RT of ‏ @JenEDavison]
Audience asks how to incentivize #openscience – @LisaGraumlich: “it’s fun being a dean” because you can begin to address such things. #sosea

@LisaGraumlich is so quotable! “As a dean, I think about money a LOT.” #soSEA

Seth Cooper: @fold_it is partnering with @educurious to design protein folding exercises (games?) for high schoolers. #soSEA

@BrianGlanz: Sharing your data openly with your name on it makes it really hard for someone to steal your data & get away with it. #soSEA

#soSEA is discussing the importance & challenge of maintaining clear metadata. @LisaGraumlich: “Everyone feels a bit of metadata guilt.”

… (2) Data have more credibility if gathered transparently and collaboratively. #sosea

@LisaGraumlich: Why would scientists want to do Open Science? (1) They can do bigger projects if they work together….

Seth is part of the UW Center for Game Science. I didn’t realize we had one of those. #soSEA

Dean @LisaGraumlich of UW College of the Environment defines Science Online as technology + trust. #sosea

Listening to Seth Cooper talk at #sosea…. Over 250,000 people have played Foldit!

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Megalobibliomania

April 5, 2012

My aunt just sent us the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, upon which the Martin Scorsese movie Hugo is based. It is enormous — over 500 pages long, and resembling the later Harry Potter volumes in size and shape. Phil loves it.

He loves it in part for its numerous pivotal pencil-and-paper drawings. At various key points in the story, the text simply stops and the pictures take over the narrative, in a sort of tribute to silent films (which figure into the plot).

I think Phil also appreciates the book’s sheer size, and its seemingly endless supply of twists and turns. We can read it for a full hour, and at the end of the hour there are still plenty of pages left for next time.

I hope that, once we do eventually finish it, Phil will want to explore other giant books. Maybe even Harry Potter.

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@trappedinlab’s March tweets

March 31, 2012

28 Mar: Phil: “I’m the real Cody Orange!” Dad: “Prove it! What is your birthday?” Phil: “Um . . . October 40th?”

24 Mar: My 5-year-old is my fashion guru. Today’s advice: “If you don’t want people to notice your [dirty] pants, just smile!”

23 Mar: The SingAboutScience.org database now has YouTube metadata! This has been a recurring dream of mine, along with the Jennifer Garner one.

22 Mar: During lab cleanup yesterday, our lab manager found an old, full box of 200 pairs of NASCAR earplugs. Ka-chow!

19 Mar: Didn’t want to get up early, but I sensed that the world needed a “Leaving on a Jet Plane” parody about protein glycosylation, so … Done.

17 Mar: Just made another CD mix. Chris Isaak clashes a bit with Duran Duran, but it’s a pretty smooth ride otherwise.

16 Mar: Walked down the street to rent a DVD; met a guy who told me his life story (“…I’ve made guitars for Metallica…”). I should walk more.

13 Mar: I don’t care what anyone says about Wilson Phillips or “Hold On” (http://sgp.cm/565b77) — that song is super uplifting.

8 Mar: Yakima HoJo’s, 4am: Fitness center is closed, so night manager suggests a greenway along the Yakima River. Very pretty (though dark).

8 Mar: At Yakima HoJo’s. 2 timekeeping units in my room; neither is correct or off by 60 minutes. Has it been a while since someone stayed here?

2 Mar: My package of tortillas says, “New Design – Same Great Taste!” They are thin, flat & circular. I wonder what the old design was.

1 Mar: I now know 2 people who say “etc. etc. etc.”: the King in “The King and I,” and UW Medicine’s Associate Chair for Research, Conrad Liles.

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Customer appreciation

March 26, 2012

I like the Ballard Fred Meyer for many reasons. You can buy eggs, jeans for your 5-year-old, and mirrors all in one place; the supervised holding pen for kids is nice too. What I like most, though, is the greeting message from John Mayer.

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here. Making you feel welcomed, important, and appreciated every time you shop is our number one priority. Please talk to me if you are not completely satisfied with any product or service. We hope to see you again soon. P.S. Your body is a wonderland!

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“Glee” might have been better as a movie

March 20, 2012

I’m starting to grow weary of Glee. The excessively autotuned vocals grate more as time goes on, but, more importantly, the characters don’t seem to develop or grow in consistent, compelling ways. Quinn Fabray’s pregnancy in Season 1 seems to help her find a new maturity, but by Season 3 she’s talking crazy and acting mean again. OK, she’s just a high schooler, but what about cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester? The Glee Club does her an incredible service by arranging her sister’s funeral at the end of Season 2, and she is grateful, etc. But by the next fall she is back to her old anti-Glee Club ways. Similar observations can be made of other characters.

I don’t think this is simply a matter of poor writing or sloppiness on the part of Ryan Murphy et al. I think the show’s producers are trapped in the TV medium, in which weekly shows rely on having a cast of essentially stable characters who interact in mostly predictable ways, thus allowing new episodes to be generated rather quickly (one per week). If characters change too much, that throws off the default dynamics of the show, and it gets harder to churn out episodes according to the usual formula.

In plays and movies, by contrast, main characters often do change in important ways. They have a big adventure or learn an important lesson or whatever, and by the end they are unmistakably different. The fact that they have changed is not a problem, as it is on TV, because plays and movies are tidy, self-contained entities. We don’t come back to the theater (or the theatre) the next week expecting to see another show that picks up right where the previous one ended.

At this point I am reminded that Ryan Murphy originally conceived of Glee as a movie, not a TV series. I wonder if that might have worked better in some ways. Introduce a bunch of misfit kids and their inspiring teacher, follow them as they learn to work together and express themselves through music, cheer their triumph at a big competition, celebrate the friendships and insights they’ve gained, and be done with it.

This problem of being trapped in a TV template is not unique to Glee, of course. I used to really like House, too….

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Lego police interrogation (dialogue by Phil)

March 14, 2012

[Setting: the Interrogation Room of the Lego City Police Station.]

COP #1: “Where were you in the 20th century?”

SUSPECT #1: “What are you talking about?”

COP #1: “Where were you in the 20th century?”

SUSPECT #1: “I don’t remember.”

COP #1: “Shoot him.”

[COP #2 shoots SUSPECT #1.]

COP #1, turning to SUSPECT #2: “Where were YOU in the 20th century?”

SUSPECT #2: “I don’t know.”

COP #1: “Shoot him.”

[COP #2 shoots SUSPECT #2.]

COP #1: “These guys don’t talk very well.”

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The redemptive power of track intervals

March 12, 2012

One of the few advantages of being woefully out of shape is that progress toward one’s previous level of fitness comes quickly at times.

After a depressing day at the lab, I headed over to the Green Lake track for a session of 5 x 440 yards with 220-yard jogs in between. This is what passes for a “speed workout” these days. But in contrast to a couple of weeks ago, when I did 4 x 440 in an average of 92 seconds, today’s average was 84 seconds. There was no Achilles pain, knock on wood. And I felt better.

Thanks, running — I needed that.

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Lego prodigy?

March 11, 2012

Yesterday Phil participated in a “Lego Build” competition at his school. Each kid was given the same Lego set (product number 5929, with parts for a medieval castle scene) and told to be creative rather than following the set’s instructions. Despite being at the young end of the 5- to 8-year-old age group, Phil won this division! The judges praised his “innovative, almost transgressive transmutation of the iconic Lego medium.”

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Scooby Don’t

March 10, 2012

Phil is starting to recognize the artificiality of certain plot devices in What’s New Scooby-Doo?

Me, trying to explain the episode “A Scooby-Doo Valentine”: “J.C. Chasez created evil clones of Shaggy, Scooby, Fred, Velma, and Daphne so that they would be arrested and put in jail. He did this because he was sick and tired of [his girlfriend] Rachel talking about [her ex-boyfriend] Shaggy all the time.”

Phil: “Why didn’t he just tell her?”

Exactly, son.

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Born to revise

March 5, 2012

I don’t know why Bruce Springsteen keeps popping up on my blog (here and here and here and here), but he’s on my mind again. In particular, I keep coming back to a fantastic Slate article by Louis Masur on how Springsteen labored endlessly over the song “Born To Run.”

It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track [of the album Born To Run]. [Guitarist Steve] Van Zandt now laughs at the thought of it. “Anytime you spend six months on a song, there’s something not exactly going right,” he says. “A song should take about three hours.” But Bruce was working with classic-rock motifs and images, searching for the right balance musically and lyrically. Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen’s writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. “Spontaneity,” he said, in 1981, “is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of ‘Hound Dog,’ and you put that thing on,” and it just explodes.

That’s what the writing process is like for me as well: a whole lot of fumbling around in search of a version that sounds crisp, forceful, and honest.

I don’t have many “Born To Run”-esque examples in my portfolio, but “Sing A Song Of Mom” is one composition that comes to mind. I remember struggling with the tune for an entire afternoon, then thinking, “What if I made it sound more like ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’?” And I tried that, and it worked, and I was on my way to a breezy song that sounded as though it had been written in half an hour. Perfect.

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