Category: Technology

I was recently commissioned to write a short piece about the adoption of social media and networking tools by scientists for The Euroscientist. I briefly covered various aspects of the evolution of the web and the notion of a Facebook for Science. Of course, there are lots of networks out there and both Twitter and FriendFeed are being used to boost the interactivity of scientific conferences, but until we get to at least web 2.1 and the next step towards the semantic web (3.0), it doesn’t seem that the majority of scientists are actually taking to these tools.

I asked Brian Krueger of Labspaces for his thoughts on the topic and he was inspired to produce a fully fledged blog post.

I also asked Dave Munger of SEED, researchblogging.org and scienceblogging.org fame to answer a few questions about web 2.1 and he was more than willing to offer a few insights:

“I think for scientists to be fully engaged with the online world, they need to see something in it for them – something to change the way they currently do things,” he told me. “In other words, the online world has to offer them something they need and want. I think some sites and services like Mendeley [dubbed a last.fm for research papers] and perhaps my own site, ResearchBlogging.org are helping them see that. But much of what is currently being done online doesn’t directly help scientists do what they need to do, so they’re not engaging with it.”

Munger suggests that peer review might be the next area of revolution. “The peer review system as it stands is antiquated, slow, and ungainly,” he explains. “I think a system of post-publication review might work best. Scientists would publish their work as soon as they felt it was ready for broader consumption. Then they would submit to ‘publishers’ who would ensure that the work was reviewed, placing it in the appropriate ‘journal’ based on the research’s importance and quality.”

Munger suggests that this approach, rather than submitting to and getting reviewed by several journals in the hope of being placed in the most prestigious spot, would mean that each article would only be reviewed once, thus saving time and resources.

“Reviewers wouldn’t be asked to comment on so many manuscripts, and authors wouldn’t have to be constantly resubmitting,” he says. “PLoS is taking a leadership role in this post-publication review movement.”

In order for such a system to work it would have to be transparent and open so that readers could know why a particular article was selected for a particular journal. “This in turn will lead to even more online engagement as reviewers respond to each other, and readers and authors respond to the reviews,” adds Munger.

Open notebook chemist Jean-Claude Bradley (no relation) of Drexel University believes my couching this post in such a way is a case of writing from the perspective of the glass being half empty vs half full. “You can argue any situation from the standpoint that it is a failure because adoption is below some arbitrary number,” he told me. “We could argue that science itself is failing because most of the population are not scientists, etc.”

JC Bradley is very optimistic about the direction that Open Science is taking, indeed he believes more and more people are getting involved, even if the percentages have not increased beyond some arbitrary value. “I think that more people will become more open despite not necessarily agreeing with the philosophy as their hand is forced,” he adds and offers an example in a blogpost entitled Secrecy in Astronomy and the Open Science Ratchet.

He does concede that there are still obstacles to widespread adoption. “Right now, the bottleneck is just finding people who are willing to share, giving them simple tools and helping them,” he says. “I don’t think technology is the limiting factor. Having semantics magically appear without any effort whatsoever isn’t going to happen soon – even if such systems did exist someone still has to verify the information and correct it. But with a very tiny amount of effort it is possible to abstract semantic information from organic chemistry Open Notebooks – even if the people recording the notebook don’t do the abstracting – we’re doing that for the Todd group for example and putting their info into Reaction Attempts database. JC Bradley adds that, “Every field will have to solve the problem of easily representing their data in semantically meaningful ways but the key factor is finding people willing to share.

These are a few of the science stories that caught my eye this past week:

• Hubble’s 20th anniversary treat – A stupendous image of a distant region of space, colour enhanced (of course) but amazing nevertheless.
• Draft White Paper – Researcher identifiers – How about a "SciID", like OpenID or a DOI but for identifying individual researchers? A barcode tattoo would get you into conferences you'd paid for too…or maybe not…
• Norway: brainwashed science on TV creates storm – The Norwegians have taken science to heart
• Researchers “Addicted” to Bogus Internet Studies – Spurious studies published on the internet that reveal just how addicted we are to research into internet addiction reveal that internet addictions studies are addictive…
• Is chemistry incompatible with web 2.0? – Looks to me like the question should be what can chemists do next to build on web 2.0 for the science?
• Storing carbon dioxide in cement – My first article in Technology Review for many years discusses the possibility of making green concrete, a material that rather than releasing CO2 into the atmosphere would lead to a net reduction by absorbing the greenhouse gas throughout the material's life cycle.

The self-proclaimed “best in science writing on blogs” brings us once again a wide range of posts from the great and the good of the scientific blogosphere. The project was started with Bora Zivkovic (Blog Around the Clock) who recognised that science blogs were taking on a more and more relevant role in the sharing of research results. Without wishing to get into the debates and arguments that often emerges when non-scientist or non-specialist journalists write about science or when the average scientist turns pop , most of us can recognise that there are in essence good writers and there are not so good writers.

In this year’s Open Lab Scicurious (Neurotopia) takes over the helm of the print publication with a fantastic cover design by Glendon Mellow (Flying Trilobite) and technical editing by Blake Stacey (Science After Sunclipse).

You might wonder what benefit there can possibly be to compiling a bunch of blog posts and printing them months after they appear in the blogosphere. Science blogs are bringing research out into the wider public domain in a more timely manner than ever before and doing it with skill and precision (in the majority of cases). So, a printed compilation of 50 science blog posts from 2009 provides another way to showcase how the world of science writing is evolving.

The blogs represented are written by scientists, science students, science writers and science journalists. Some of them are deadly earnest. Others more light-hearted. Some are seriously interesting. All are fascinating in their own way and many fields of science are covered within the pages of The Open Laboratory 2009. Is Sciencebase represented? I’d like to think it would stand a chance of being selected had it been submitted, but no, it’s not in there. Some of you may see that as a bonus. You can grab a copy either way via Lulu.

I have a nice pile of books on my desk that have been given the once over. Watch out for a round-up of those including How Many Licks, Shrimp, and Second Nature. Grab the Sciencebase news feed or follow our Facebook page to keep up with the latest on the site without having to check back.

Electric vehicles reduce noise and local air pollution, such as nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and ground-level ozone, but do they simply relocate the carbon tire-tracks to fossil-fired power stations or are there benefits on the global scale?

Fundamentally, an electric engine can achieve 85 to 90% energy conversion efficiency, which contrasts starkly with the internal combustion engine, which can achieve at most 20%, requiring the conversion of oil-derived fuel (diesel or petroleum) into mechanical motion. So, there it might just be possible that electric vehicles could be greener, but only if the carbon tire-tracks are smaller when all energies and emissions are added into the equation.

Ã…sgeir Helland of Think Global AS (manufacturer of the Think City electric car), based in Snaroya, Norway, thinks so. He has carried out a “well-to-wheel” carbon dioxide analysis of the usage phase of electric vehicles compared with vehicles using an internal combustion engine. His study confirms that electric vehicles do indeed relocate the carbon emissions from the transport sector to the electricity sector. Of course, as electricity generation becomes increasingly based on renewables that will matter less.

Nevertheless, Helland’s research shows that urban driving leads to total carbon emission reductions from 30 to 95% depending on the country in question. “In rush hour the electric vehicle outperforms all other fossil-fuelled alternatives even if charged on electricity from hard coal,” says Helland.

Now, I know this blog is all “science part”, but here’s a bit of data just to rev up the date. At the fuel station, the associated well-to-tank emissions for the supply of 1 litre of fuel are almost 0.5 kg (478.5 g) for petroleum (gas) and 420 g for diesel. The carbon dioxide emissions per litre of fuel combusted are 2.4 and 2.7 kg for petroleum and diesel, respectively. The total emissions associated with consuming 1 l of fuel were 2.88 kg for gasoline (0.48 kg/l + 2.40 kg/l) and 3.08 kg for diesel (0.42 kg/l + 2.66 kg/l).

An electric vehicle, exemplified by the Th!nk City car, will reduce global carbon dioxide emissions compared with internal combustion engines. “This is true for all countries and urban driving patterns regardless of the electricity mixes analysed in this study,” Helland says, “For urban driving, the reductions amount to about 95% in Norway, 90% in Switzerland, 40 to 60% in the UK, and 30 to 50% in the Netherlands.

There are 215 million cars in the European Union with average emissions of some 160 grams per kilometre and related well-to-wheel emissions of 186 g/km. Replacing only 10% of the European car fleet would reduce the yearly carbon dioxide emissions to almost 50 million tonnes with a relatively modest increase in electricity generation requirements.

“The electric vehicle outperforms all internal combustion engine alternatives if charged on electricity from a renewable source,” concludes Helland, “Moving from a combustion engine to an electric engine for vehicles will be a necessary change to reduce the impacts of transport on climate change. The electric vehicle’s environmental benefits are significant.”

But, then he would say that…

What are you thoughts, are electric vehicles an environmental panacea or do we need a paradigm shift in attitudes towards transport?

Ã…sgeir Helland (2009). Well-to-wheel CO2 analysis of electric and ICE vehicles: are global CO2 emission reductions possible? Int. J. Global Warming, 1 (4), 432-442

Related articles on EVs and emissions

• Energy storage key to electric car plan, committee says (cbc.ca)
• Study: Electric Cars Produce 30 Percent More Emissions Than Ethanol Cars (simplygreen.co.za)
• Earth’s greenhouse gases reach record highs (cbc.ca)

This is the Sciencebase blogging schedule for the remainder of 2009:

Sciencebase.com Dec 8 – Science news round-up with a spectral twist

Sciencebase.com Dec 9 Electric vehicles better than hybrids?

ImagingStorm.co.uk – Dec 10 Science of sepia-toned photography

Sciencetext.com Dec 15 Cathartic emails for overworked journalists

Sciencetext.com Dec 16 Tips for Twitter brutes

Sciencebase.com Dec 17 Pre-Xmas science book reviews

SciScoop.com Dec 22 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) diatribe (anon guest post)

Sciencebase.com Dec 23 Green by design

Sciencebase.com Dec 24 Happy Solstice Event

Nothing’s fixed and I will undoubtedly slot a few extra posts in here and there depending on what science and technology news catches my attention. Headlines will all appear in my @sciencebase Twitter Feed and intros will also appear on the Sciencebase Facebook Fan Page. Service may be intermittent during the coming solstice event celebrations but will resume as per normal in 2010.

Regular readers will hopefully have spotted I’ve cleaned up the site a little recently and added a couple of new widgets to the Sciencebase sidebar menu just below the About section link to my Research Blogging posts.

The first widget heralds the relaunch of the sciencebase.com Facebook fan page and its adoption of a proper URL – http://www.facebook.com/sciencebase.fans. Become a fan and your mugshot will appear at some point on the site itself, amazing, huh? It also means you can get the sciencebase content more directly while on Facebook and comment etc.

Second new item is the live Twitter feed widget, which will display my latest tweets, obvious really, giving you links to the various headlines as they appear on Sciencebase, SciScoop, Sciencetext, and elsewhere. (Elsewhere is usually my Imaging Storm scientific photo blog with my built-in flickr feed, my soundcloud (mostly me making a noise with a guitar and an effects pedal), and a few other places.

UPDATED: 23rd September.

The various lists are filling up slowly but surely, although the scientwists list is generally full at the 500 mark, occasionally a space becomes available, so it’s worth pinging me if you want to be added.

List nameFollowing

scientwists	500
archaeo	7 14
bio	222 285
chem	55 95
earth	23 41
physics	37 56
sci-comms	251 409
space	42 53
tech	19 32
scientific-musos	38

List categories expanded:

# archaeo – archaeology (thanks to @r8lobster for the suggestion and tweeps)
# bio — medicine, physicians, health, psychologists, psychiatrists, bioinformatics, pharma
# chem — chemical sciences, materials, nanotechnology
# earth — geology, geography, environment, climate, oceans, marine science
# physics — physics, particles, maths
# sci-comms — science communicators, educators, editors, writers, bloggers, marketing, publicity, government
# tech — science computing, software, hardware, technology, engineering
# space — astronomy, space travel, stars, planets, cosmology
# scientific-musos – scientwists who are also musicians

The manually compiled Scientwists list of science people on Twitter grew from around 100 of my contacts in January 2009 to almost 700 members, who asked to join or who retweeted the link as of October.

Justin Reid helped automate the inclusion of bios and photos and 2020science did some amazing analyses to show how all those science types were interconnected. The scientwist list is now on Listorious and doing very well in the Top 140 of all lists listed, the more followers the better, would love to make the Top 10 by the end of the year, get science in its rightful place – so please do follow the scientwists list and help make that happen!

A lot of work went into building up the resource, especially when I felt compelled to migrate it all to TweepML.org to allow users to more easily follow members.

Meanwhile, Twitter was working on its own lists feature, which is now open to everyone. I recreated the scientwists list using their system, but they limit membership to just 500 and that was full very quickly. Pressure was then on from various contacts to categorise all those science types and call me stupid and imagine that I have nothing better to do, but I’ve now done that. I’ve also added lots of new science types along the way as they emerged from different corners of the twitterhood.

I’ve categorised people as best I could, some are not on the original scientwists list because of space limitations. Those tweeps, however, will be be listed in two lists as appropriate. Those on the scientwists list will have one additional listing depending on what appears to be their main focus.

The TweepML version of the scientwists list is now defunct.

Laura Bonetta wrote an excellent article for the science journal Cell recently in which she quoted various science types who use Twitter on the subject of whether or not scientists should be tweeting. It’s a topic I’ve discussed more generally regarding scientists’ use of social media and online networking communities.

Anyway, she asked my opinion on a few matters regarding twitter and quoted me at some length. But, as is the way with such articles, which I’ve experienced from all three angles now, as interviewer, interviewee, and editor, she trimmed off the fat and rind from my responses, so I asked her if she’d be happy for me to reproduce them in their unedited entirety and she was, so here they are:

As far as I can tell you are the most widely followed science-based Twitter there is. Is that right?

I’ve no way of confirming that, but of the scientwists I follow, I don’t think many of them have 5000 or more followers. With the exception of @ProfBrianCox (8000+) and @RichardWiseman (12000+), and a few others. I’m small fry, though, compared to some of the much more successful Twitter users in other niches and I don’t just mean celebrities.

What do you think makes your Twitter entries so popular?

One reason is probably my proactive approach to building up a following with whom I engage on a daily basis via Twitter and in some cases on other online networks. If you tweet and then just sit back and expect users to beat a path to your door it doesn’t work. You have to be “out there” talking to people, being useful for potential followers, drumming up interest and then continually offering something back in return. Being friendly and avoiding expletives may help too ;-)

From what I have read your tweets are all about science or science policy. Do you ever Twitter about personal things?

It’s important to have a niche, I’ve been a science writer for more than 20 years, I guess talking about science is a big part of my life. Occasionally, I’ll tweet a photo via TwitPic I’ve taken or a song I’ve recorded via SoundCloud…but in general my followers know me for the science stuff.

Few scientists Twitter and most of them are postdocs or grad students? Why are few scientists into Twitter?

Well, I created a list of scientwists that now has more than 600 members, and there are lots of science Twibes now, including my scientist Twibe (500+ members). But, those are still small numbers compared to the numbers of scientists who could join. But, I don’t think it’s just Twitter that they are not into. I’ve spoken to lots of people who either just don’t “get it” (online social networking) or if they do get it, they see it as a waste of time.

There are, however, lots of niche online services aimed directly at scientists, even these are, in general, struggling to reach critical mass. That said, LinkedIn and Twitter themselves were not overnight successes. I just wrote about this very issue of generation F scientists on my blog.

Do you think it would be valuable for more scientists to Twitter?

I think there is a lot to gain from being connected in this way. Again, there has to be a way to build a mutually beneficial following that has some purpose. Certainly, there is little point in scientists joining simply to tweet about their coffee breaks, walking holidays, or showering schedule. However, if they wish to share their successes and failures in the lab, swap useful information and tips, or seek advice, then Twitter could be a useful way to do that.

Is the 140-character limit a good or bad thing for disseminating scientific information?

It’s a double-edged sword. The majority of my tweets are pointers to other resources, so there’s a headline, an enticement in other words, and a link to the resource. You don’t need more than 140-characters for that; and it still leaves room for someone to retweet it. However, you cannot have a decent, full-blown, high-level discussion via text message and Twitter is just the same. A lot of scientists recognise that and use FriendFeed as an “uber-twitter” instead.

Do you think Twitter could have an important role in science?

Well, it already does in a limited way. Certainly, I have heard about some scientific discoveries first on Twitter. It also occasionally throws up a truly unique viewpoint on a discovery or theory that can be stimulating for my writing and presumably could do the same for scientists reading those tweets too. The apparent spontaneity and brevity helps, but you have to keep up with a lot of streams to find the nuggets.

What is its value to you?

Fame and fortune! No, seriously, I just find it fun to use and it provides another way to let people know about what I’ve written and so get them reading my words. What more could a science writer ask? Also, as a writer, it’s yet another outlet through which I can express myself as and when the urge arises.

You also have a blog. How do you choose what’s a blog or Twitter-type entry? How do the two media differ?

I’m not sure I know what you mean. I blog about scientific discoveries, policy etc, and also point to my published work on other sites, I try to be unique in what I blog about, so there would be no choice between blogging or tweeting something. I don’t write blog entries with Twitter in mind, I write them with the reader in mind, and I rarely change the way I write a headline to suit Twitter, if I do it’s only to shorten it by a word or two.

The headlines from my blog are automatically fed to my Twitter account using the WordTwit plugin for WordPress. I hope they will act as a springboard for readers to jump to the blog. I also use a plugin called ChatCatcher, which pulls in comments people make about a post on Twitter and FriendFeed and ties them to the post in question.

How do you choose whom to follow?

Now, that’s a whole new can of worms to open. I no longer actively seek out new people to follow, although if I comes across someone interesting elsewhere I will usually follow them on Twitter. However, when someone new follows me, I do try to check out their bio, their website and their most recent tweets. If those things are of interest, then I’ll follow back.

I created a tongue-in-cheek Twitter decision flowchart that is actually semi-serious to reveal my thought processes and seems to gel with a lot of readers. Mostly, it’s about filtering out spammers, cranks, and selfish marketers.