Category Archives: Scio12

A huge thank you to everyone!

Back in February I wrote a grant application through UNM to reimburse money for travel to ScienceOnline 2012. I then wrote a blog post asking for people on the internet to review my grant and provide feedback so I can be assured success. The result was overwhelming as I instantly had many people leaving comments on my grant with really useful feedback.

Today I received word that I won the grant money!

I wish to thank each and everyone who read my grant, reviewed it, read my blog/notebook, retweeted my plea for help, and/or wrote comments. I really appreciate the help you provided and I hope I can count on you all again when I go public with my #SciFund Challenge proposal.

As an added bonus I learned that I scored a 92.544 out of 100 on my grant which just shows that collective knowledge works for the better!

Going to ScienceOnline 2012 was such a unique opportunity and I cherished it regardless of paying for the unconference out of pocket or with grant money. I met so many people who I now regularly communicate with and work with/hope to work with in the near future. I am truly humbled by the experience of ScienceOnline 2012, the efforts to aid me in my research, and the effort to help me secure funding for the unconference.

After all, if it wasn’t for this huge success, I would not have written this post, which I consider my biggest success in blogging.

Again I thank you all from the bottom of my heart!!!

Send me to #scio12 Part 2

Thanks to everyone who read my grant and provided feedback or one or the other! I really appreciate it. I’ve made a bunch of edits based on all the feedback I received. The grant is due tomorrow and I want to send it through one last round of scrutiny before it gets submitted. So click the link:

ScienceOnline Travel Grant

And if you don’t want to click then check out the original post here (which has the document embedded in it).

Help me pay for going to #scio12 (by reviewing my grant)

I’m writing a grant to the Student Research Allocations Committee (SRAC) part of the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA) here at the University of New Mexico (UNM). The grant is for up to $500 which is almost exactly what I need to pay for the airfare.

The reviewers try to be as objective as possible about the grading and you can find a rubric here: Scoring Sheet.

I’m writing the grant in Google Docs and I’ve made it so that anyone can comment. So leave comments either below in the comment section of this post or in the document itself. This right now is a work in progress and will be expanded as the day goes on. If you can read and critique my grant I would be much appreciative. Granting in the open can be fun and let’s show a collaborative effort makes a winner. Here is the embed:

And here is the link in case you can’t get to the document from the embed: Send Anthony to ScienceOnline 2012

#sciencescribe Scientists and Wikipedia at #scio12

Illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me!) and session hosted by Dario Taraborelli and Greta Munger.

This was a super interesting session. It was so interesting that I had to stop scribing so I could get involved in the conversation. The bulk of the conversation discussed how to get others involved in collaborating on Wikipedia.

Many people are afraid to contribute and the interesting thing is that, their fears are kinda justified as the moderators on Wikipedia can be kinda harsh when it comes to accepting edits. Not only this, but the people who should contribute (leaders in the field) frequently don’t and it’s obvious the world could greatly benefit from their contributions. The moderators described keys to getting over this barrier and presented an interesting case study: a class assignment that involved creating articles on Wikipedia!

Some of those principles from that case study I’m actually applying in my own lab this semester, but more geared towards open notebook science (instead of creating wikipedia content). The goal is the same though, to get the students used to contributing to collective knowledge and to encourage them to communicate with their community (each other).

#sciencescribe Altmetrics session at #scio12

Illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me), session hosted by Euan Adie and Martin Fenner.

Altmetrics are web analytics tools designed to accurately measure the true impact of modern scientific publications. The biggest criticism with peer review is a lot of the process is slow and dated and the major way to gauge usefulness of a publication is to measure impact factor which is just as skewed as the perception of peer review being critical today. I have a lot of interesting views on this that I won’t go into now, but you can read all about altmetrics here and find some cool modern tools that attempt to properly gauge impact here.

This session introduced the idea of alternative metrics and displayed the various tools that attempt to collect various data scattered throughout the web to gauge impact in a modern, insightful way. And above are my sketch notes from that session. Enjoy!

#sciencescribe Sketch Notes from #scio12

I’ve mentioned this before and tweeted about it a couple times, but there was a session at ScienceOnline 2012 that taught conference attendees the practice of sketch noting. Perrin Ireland (@experrinment) hosted the session and then encouraged all who attended to practice during the conference. We would even get our work publicized.

So in the next series of posts I’m going to publish the sketch notes from the conference. I’ve also been inspired to continue to practice my sketch note skills and I’ll be posting sketch notes from lectures, seminars, colloquium, etc until the day I graduate (and hopefully beyond).

To start I’m going to share my sketch note of the sketch note session. I was practicing as I was learning. I’m also posting the sketch note Perrin created of the session that I moderated with Jean-Claude Bradley (Open Notebook Science). Check them out in the gallery below.

Mini-success for open notebook science

I’ve been talking to a lot of non-open scientists lately and I can tell they are really intrigued by what I do (as far as openness is concerned). My friend John is beginning to see the power in open access and so are a few others. This is a success in my book because every little bit helps.

But lately I started to date someone (Jacqueline) who immediately was turned on by the idea of open notebook science. She thought it was really cool but said there was almost no way her advisors would let her do it.

Anyways, Jacqueline just started a rotation in a molecular biology lab at the UNM Cancer Research Facility (which I just found out has no mention online, so sorry no link) and she is being trained to do transformations of E. coli, PCR, ligations, etc. To help her get an understanding of the experiments she will be carrying out I showed her my OpenWetWare notebook which houses all my molecular biological information.

I told her it’s all open so she should feel free to browse around and I explained how I set my notebook up to help make her navigation a bit easier.

The next day Jacqueline approached me and told me how useful my notebook was for her in understanding the experiments and to understand the setup. She then told me the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard…

“I want an open notebook.”

And of course I told her she could have one, and that I would explain how I’ve come to use various media to record information. A crash course in open notebook science if you will. And I’m extremely excited to teach the lesson, and I’m sure she is equally excited to learn about it.

But this little anecdote reminds me of an important issue. At ScienceOnline 2012, it was asked in my ONS session if there should be a site that is dedicated to open notebook success stories. The point would be to show people the benefits of open notebook science so there would be less hesitation to join the fun.

I agree that something should be set up and I’ll need to speak with some people that I met at the conference as well as other leaders in the field to try and establish some success stories (both big and small) that would be worth mentioning. I think at the very least, there should be a comment type setup, where people can just leave their own success stories. That would be very powerful. A shorter version of the story above would be an excellent candidate.

Brian Glanz of the Open Science Federation (got it right this time) had a brief discussion about it with me at the conference and he mentioned it on a post of mine here. Let’s brain storm this idea and get it off the ground!

#scio12 @lifeandscience museum tour pictures!

At ScienceOnline, Friday afternoon was filled with a variety of fun things to get out and do (everyday had a ton to do, but Friday was especially special). There were a few museum things to do and a bunch of tech demos. All of which can be found here and here (search techno blitz demo and click that). I got to visit the Museum of Life and Science to tour the facility and meet some new peop… friends.

The pictures that I took (and some others) can be found on my photo site. From that page, just click next page and you’ll see the pics I took. Feel free to download the images, as I attribute all my stuff CC – attribution. To view the full size image, click an image to see a slightly larger version (from the thumbnails) and then click the link on the right that says “Full Size Image.” Simple!

It was a ridiculously fun experience. I got to hold a baby alligator, take a picture with a bear (minus the mauling), get up close with a bunch of lemurs, and play with and see a ton of other creatures. The others in the group were great and it was awesome to meet such a great group. I always get lucky and end up with a spectacular group of people to bond with.

Later today (when I get home) I’ll upload my 3 favorite animal pics from the site, just for poops and giggles. Stay tuned… and come back the rest of the week as I collect my thoughts from the conference and jot ideas down here.

#scio12 agenda for Friday

Tomorrow is going to be an amazingly fun day. Here is what I plan to do:

  • wake up! It will be nice to get around on a full night’s sleep.
  • eat! nothing makes me feel better than a full belly!
  • Using altmetrics tools to track the online impact of your research – This hopefully will be a discussion that is directly relatable to my web analytics to measure impact studies. I don’t know if I’ll be sketch noting this session, or tweeting the ideas, but regardless of how it gets done, there will be some recap here tomorrow.
  • Scientists and Wikipedia – This sounds like a crazy session and I can’t wait to hear what comes out of it. I’m not going to butcher the description here so just click the link and see for yourself.
  • Science Communication, Risk Communication, and the role of Social Networks – Seems like this session will be a discussion of how to avoid mass hysteria when bringing scientific information to the public. The first thing that comes to mind is the reaction to the neutrinos results from several months ago. I bet I’ll have something to say here.
  • In the afternoon I’ll be on a special behind the scenes tour of the Museum of Life and Science. I am super excited about this and expect tons of pictures from this event.
  • Then there is a banquet in the evening, where I hope to meet tons of great people and have another nice collection of business cards with links to share.

#scio12 business cards from day 1

I’ve met some cool people and exchanged information with some. As kind of a thank you for sharing with me and let’s do something together, I’m going to share the names of the people who’ve provided me with contact info, tell a little of what they do and send them some hits! What a great world it is…

  • Perrin Ireland (@experrinment) – www.alphachimp.com Perrin is the scio12 science scribe-r and taught a bunch of us the ways of sketch noting, which is basically visually representing ideas in a sort of storyboard way. It’s the most beautiful brain dump I’ve ever seen. I’ll have a few of these by the end of the conference and I’ll be sharing those with you all.
  • Brian Glanz (@brianglanz) – opensciencefederation.com Brian was in my session about ONS and approached me afterward to talk about the viability of ONS for all scientists. I think there are some good things in our future…
  • Amy Teitel (@astVintageSpace) – vintagespace.wordpress.com I met Amy this morning and we talked at length in the afternoon. She’s a promising blogger/writer that has tons of fascinating stories about the history of space flight. I promised her awesome business cards. Follow her on twitter and talk with her to show her that Twitter is useful after all.
  • Walter Jessen (@wjjessen) – walterjessen.com I also met Walter this morning. He promised to introduce me to someone and I really want to know who this person is. The mystery is killing me. We talked a lot about ONS and open science and how cool it really is.
  • I also met a woman named Deb at the Museum of Natural Sciences. I didn’t get her last name, but her and her colleagues are doing some pretty awesome outreach experiments with the local community. I told her about ONS and she seemed really excited to setup something in this regard for her program. We’ll be talking I’m sure…

Tomorrow I expect to meet a ton more people and get a ton more cards. At which point I will share more links with you all. Until then…