Eisen Lab Blog

Workshop at #UCDavis 3/24 From Science to Storytelling: Effective Communication for Policy Change

From Science to Storytelling: Effective Communication for Policy Change

Conveying the results of your scientific research to legislators and government agencies can help influence policy – but only if you communicate effectively! If you are motivated in part by applying your research to environmental and social issues such as climate change, this workshop will give you some useful concepts and tools. Using discussion, role plays, expert advice from media consultants and individual exercises, we will explore the challenges of translating your scientific findings to policymakers and advocates, and will offer some tools for improving your communications skills. We will focus on simplifying your messages and honing your presentations.

Invited participants:

Academic researchers working on climate change and agriculture. Registered participants may also invite one graduate student.

Organizers:

California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) and Resource Media

Date, time, location:

March 24, 1:00 – 4:00

Big Hanna Room, Asmundson Hall, UC Davis

Cost: Free

To register: Email Renata Brillinger at CalCAN (renata@calclimateag.org) with your name, department, institution and phone number. If you would like to bring one graduate student, please include their information as well. Space is limited.

Science Communication workshop 3-24-14.pdf

Using Social Media to Promote Your Research (workshop)

I’ll be running a social media workshop next Friday in the Genome Center – anyone on campus is welcome to attend! Details as follows:

Using Social Media
to Promote Your Research

Friday, February 7, 2014
12:30-2:30pm
Room 4202, Genome Center

Many view social media as either a fun distraction, a waste of time – or both!  But social media tools can be a tremendous resource for academics seeking to share their research, find new collaborations, and ultimately advance their careers.

Attend this workshop to learn how to:

  • Use social media to share and promote your research
  • Identify appropriate audiences and avoid pitfalls
  • Choose the right platforms to help you achieve your goals

Please pre-register using this online form: http://bit.ly/1ajX6Pc (Pre-registration will help to guide the format of the workshop and the type of social media tools covered)

PDF Flyer available here

Visualization of fecal transplants – well – thankfully – of the microbial community data not the actual transplant

I love things like this. A simple Youtube video from Antonio González Peña and Rob Knight’s group. The video shows data from a study of microbial communities and how they respond to a fecal transplant. Simple. Short. And the visualization is nice.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Wanted – examples of ways to get DOIs for blog posts & how they are used

For many years I have been wondering about the best way to get more formal credit for blog posts I have written.  It seems like the simplest way to do this would be to get a DOI for a blog post under some sort of publishing system and to use that DOI as the citable unit for the post.  I remember a while back Titus Brown wrote about this exact idea: Posting blog entries to figshare – Living in an Ivory Basement but I have not seen much else out there on ways to do this and what the implications are.  Anyone else out there know examples of how people have gotten DOIs for blog posts and if this has been useful?  Thanks

 

 

Pete Seeger, RIP, on women in engineering …

When I was growing up, we went to Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie concerts every year at Wolf Trap. I have loved Seeger since then and thus was very sad to hear he died a few days ago. My mom is visiting right now and she and I have been talking about “Women in Science” issues (and for example she brought me some nice presents which I posted about Monday).

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js And in talking to my mom today she reminded me of this song Seeger used to sing every year when we saw the show. It is by his sister. And it is a good rallying cry for “Women in STEM” fields, I think. Here it is:

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Interested in #OpenAccess publishing?: definitely take a look at this working paper from CREATe

Well, this is certainly the most comprehensive treatise I have ever seen on Open Access publishing: Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review | CREATe.  It was written by “Giancarlo Frosio under the supervision of Estelle Derclaye (2014)” and

comes from the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe).  It is VERY comprehensive and has discussion, review, and comments on just about every issue associated with Open Access publishing that one could think of. I do not know if there is any particular “angle” to the writings here.  What I looked at (not all of the document) seemed to be a relatively objective assessment of various OA issues.  Anyway, it is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in scholarly publishing or Open Access publishing or related issues.

Expert translation of details on "Clinical trial for autologous stool transplant" that is seeking volunteers

Well, if you are between 18 and 70 and are healthy and want to participate in a  clinical trial this may be for you.  Titled Autologous Fecal Therapy the description uses some science jargon to describe the plan.  They say

“Ten healthy volunteers will be recruited to receive either an autologous stool transplant or a saline enema to determine if autologous fecal microbiota therapy will be able to rapidly, and safely, restore a patient’s fecal microbiome after antimicrobial exposure.”

Or, in other words – they want you to (1) save your shit (2) take some antibiotics and (3) deliver either salt water or your own shit back into your rear.

Actually quite interesting.  And I encourage people to consider volunteering.  But I just thought it would be good to make sure you knew what this was about …

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior on “What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?”

In the run up to our meeting on “Publish or perish? The future of academic publishing and careers February 13 – 14, 2014 at UC Davis” I am going to be writing some blog posts about the topics of the meeting.  Just as I started to do a few web searches for one such post – I discovered a very timely article published a few days ago in Vitae: What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?.  The article is by Sarah Kendzior who is a writer who I have interacted with a few times here and there (she writes for Al Jazeera English and writes a lot about Academia).  It is an interesting read.

Winner of the biggest & best overselling of the microbiome -@theallium on Salmonella Diet

OK.  Now this is some serious overselling of the microbiome: New Salmonella diet achieves “amazing” weight-loss for microbiologist | The Allium.  A must read for anyone interested in microbes and microbiomes.  My favorite part:

“For some time now, we have known that the microbes of the gut – what we term the “microbiome” – play a very important role in our daily lives. What we eat, how healthy we feel, etc. is all controlled by our microbiome. In fact, nothing else is important to our health, except the microbiome – it can defeat cancer, cure hunger, poverty, restore amputated limbs, everything”, said Dr. Nofit.

Although it might seem to be an exaggeration, I think this Dr. Nofit must be correct.  I will now never claim that anyone has oversold the microbiome, because, well, it does everything.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Some readings on Gender Disparities in Scientific Publishing

Just a little post here with a collection of links to what I have been reading recently on Gender disparities in scientific publishing

Bibliometrics: Global gender disparities in science : Nature News & Comment

which I found out about from

How to calculate #MyGenderGap for publishing scientists

which I found out about from

My Gender Gap: Is there value in calculating the gender ratio of coauthors?

which I found out about from

Gina Baucom on Facebook

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Some other reading of interest:

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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