Tweeting at the Science Museum
When I was in the seventh grade I got “lost” in the American Museum of Natural History while on a field trip. I got distracted in the Hall of Gems and Minerals and next thing I knew my group was gone. Following the directions drilled into us prior to departing from our middle school cafeteria that morning, I saw my English teacher with her group of students entering the hall and wandered over to her to announce the obvious, “I’m not where I’m supposed to be.” I was quickly reunited with the correct group and the day passed without other incident.
This memory has to be similar to memories held by students all over the tri-state area who have made the trek into the museum’s halls. Places like the American Museum of Natural History, or even The DaVinci Science Center where I would find myself interning nearly a decade after my adventure in the Hall of Gems and Minerals are special to me because they hold such great memories of exploring science as a kid, and helping kids explore science as an adult. I’ve always looked at science museums or science centers from that kid-centric lens. But these places have a lot more to offer, particularly for adults and I think one way science museums and centers can reach adults is through social media.
I’ve noticed this particularly since I started following the American Museum of Natural History on Twitter. Social media presents an enormous opportunity to connect with different types of people, and I feel like the American Museum of Natural History in particular is reaching a wide audience and making the most of having a social media presence on a platform like twitter. This isn’t just marketing to soccer moms and elementary school teachers, not with over 91,000 followers. I mean I’m neither of those things and they’ve got my attention. I wanted to share a few things that I’ve noticed about the @AMNH‘s twitter stream that make me think whoever is behind the keyboard over there gets it.
1. Offering the why, not just the what – Any organization can operate a twitter account and fill it with plugs for their programs. What an organization does is important, but why they do it is more important. The why is what is going to keep people coming back long after that single exhibit they were originally interested in has moved on. While the AMNH account certainly tweets about reserving tickets to special exhibits, the majority of the tweets offer the why. There is actual information to be had here, like this piece on archaeology on St. Catharines Island. Is it promoting the museum? Sure the post’s writer David Hurst Thomas is the curator of North American Archaelogy in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology. But is it offering information you wouldn’t otherwise have? Sure. It is also providing depth to a topic that perhaps wouldn’t have drawn many people to the museum, I mean it’s hard to compete with the blue whale. It gives you a sense of who the people are who work for the AMNH. Which in this case, I think could turn a one time visitor into that person who comes back again and again.
2. Tweeting about other things – Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo has a new baby aardvark, and the Google Science Fair is currently accepting entries. These two things have little to do with one another aside from the fact that I learned about both from the @AMNH twitter account. Tweeting about things other than yourself tells me that one there is a real person behind the account, and two that person is interested in the science community not just getting people through the doors. I like that. It makes me trust not just the information in the twitter stream, but the organization itself.
3. Variety – Even when just dealing with tweets regarding the museum’s own content, there is a tremendous amount of variety in the @AMNH twitter stream. There are picture galleries, videos that explain different of topics, podcasts, hashtaged tweets about lectures or talks, and replies to individual twitter users. There is information about the people who work at or are involved in the museum when they are covered in the media. It all adds up to creating a feeling that this is about people. In terms of marketing, I think this strategy really works because it highlights all the people and topics that the museum is involved in, which makes it seem personal and approachable rather than simply like a box office.
There are plenty of other examples I could give about how a science museum could use social media, or even about what I’ve observed the American Museum of Natural History doing. They are clearly involved in a lot and have embraced social media and the interwebs. But for now, I encourage you to check them on Twitter for yourself. Whether you have kids or are a kid at heart who still gets butterflies entering the hall of African Mammals, a person who just has an interest in science and related topics or cool stuff, or are looking for an example of how to run a professional twitter stream I think there will be value in it for you. The @AMNH is #doingitright and might be worth the follow.
Book Review: The Power Of Habit
I have a smart phone habit. My cue is the little green light that indicates I have a new message. My ritual is checking the phone to see what that message is and who sent it. The reward I get from doing this is the rush of immediately connecting through a text message, email, Facebook mention, or Twitter notification with people that I like or want to talk to. I had no idea this smart phone cycle had become habitual to me, until I read about it in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. His description of the smart phone cycle I just explained seems to fit me exactly, particularly because I don’t have to think about what to do when I see that little green light, I just check the phone without really thinking about it.
It would be accurate to say that The Power of Habit blew my mind. I walked away with that feeling of shock and awe you end up with when you finally understand something that seems so glaring and obvious now that it has been explained to you, and it has actually made sense. It is the feeling I got in seventh grade when the pythagorean theorem finally clicked in my brain after months of trying to understand it (well, maybe that was a little more exciting because my very relieved math teacher called for Jolly Ranchers all around to celebrate my breakthrough). Still, The Power of Habit blew my mind because now that I know what I’m looking for it is easy to identify the dozens of things I do out of habit, that I never really considered habitual.
Duhigg expertly explains that each habit occurs as a loop in our brain. There is a cue that triggers the habit, the routine (whatever action you do to perform the habit), and lastly the reward our brain feels from performing this routine. This habit loop takes place for different activities, at different times of day, and for different types of habits. Some habits we can easily identify because they are notorious for their negative effects like over eating, smoking, drinking to excess, etc. But there are many habits that are not detrimental, and in fact help us to get through our day without overloading our brain with decisions.
For example, every morning I perform the same habit immediately after waking up. My alarm goes off (cue), I go to the kitchen and press the button on the coffee pot (routine), and I end up sitting at my computer with a warm mug while caffeine percolates through me and I wake up (reward). This type of habit can sometimes be thought of as the things we do on “autopilot” like driving to work by the same route, or checking your email at the same times every day. I had never thought of my everyday actions as habits, but once I was clued into the cue, routine, reward loop I was able to identify dozens of instances within my own behavior. It is quite obvious really, but I had just never looked at my life that way before. Consider my mind blown.
There is a tremendous amount of information in The Power of Habit, and Duhigg navigates it all with precision. I think reading this book could have value for anyone interested in their own behavior. It definitely held some insights for me as to why I do what I do. A good example of the type of stories told in The Power of Habit is this excerpt which ran in the New York Times magazine “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” about how customer behavior clues companies into things you would never actually tell them. In general, I would recommend this book because the examples and explanations are really interesting and the structure of the narrative drives the book forward in a way that never seems to drag on. It is an easy and informative read.
That being said I do want to take a moment to talk about the structure of the book from a writer’s point of view. I was personally impressed with the way this book is structured, with the different studies and stories cobbled together to create one strong explanation of what habits are, how they work, and what they do. The book is broken into three parts: The Habits of Individuals, The Habits of Successful Organizations, and The Habits of Societies. These parts contain three, four, and two chapters respectively. The chapters all tell multiple stories, which in my opinion serve both to provide context and examples for the scientific studies Duhigg discusses, while hooking the reader and forcing them forward through the text.
For example, chapter three opens with Tony Dungy a professional football coach (who won a Super Bowl with the Indianapolis Colts), and from Dungy goes onto Bill Wilson the found of Alcoholics Anonymous, then scientific studies of alcoholism, onto a girl who bites her nails, followed by an explanation of habit reversal therapy, back to Tony Dungy, then back to alcoholism, and finally wraps up with the conclusion of Dungy’s story. The chapter jumps around, and sometimes feels like you’re being teased with just bits and pieces. Still, none of this was ever confusing for me, I was always aware of where I was within the text.
All the different elements of chapter three are wrapped around the theme of how people actually succeed at changing their habits. The structuring of this chapter is smart. I wanted to know what happened to Dungy, that was the narrative I wanted to see play out. I was personally interested in Dungy, but the other content in the chapter – the discussions of alcoholism and nail biting along with the scientific research – framed the Dungy story so that it wasn’t just a story about a unique football coach, it was a story about what it really takes to achieve a change in behavior drastic enough to override our established habits. It all works together, beautifully.
With a well thought out and careful structure, perfectly chosen examples, and easy to understand scientific evidence The Power of Habit is an interesting, accessible and solidly researched piece of writing. It is entertaining for anyone looking to read for fun, and a great case study for writers looking to learn more about how to structure their own work.
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Note: I was contacted by the author regarding the release of this book, and I accepted a copy compliments of Random House. Never did anyone try to influence what I would say if I decided to write a post about The Power of Habit. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Am I Science?
Scientists don’t really wear white lab coats. They usually don’t stand in front of old cabinets full of glass jars and beakers containing a rainbow of colored liquids. Unless someone has had an unfortunate bunsen burner accident it is unlikely that there is smoke wafting through the lab, or beakers bubbling over with a frothy white foam. If these images are what come to mind when you think of scientist, you need an update. It isn’t your fault, either.
Taking pictures or video to accompany my stories, I’ve had to ask myself how can I make a shot look more…sciencey? In the media we do a great disservice to scientists every time we stick them in the white coat peering into a microscope. Not that scientists don’t peer into microscopes, they do. But the stereotype has been allowed to run roughshod over every scientific discipline to the point where people barely recognize scientists who don’t fit the stereotype. Most scientists don’t fit the stereotype. But I’ve still dragged interviewees around a building until I find a suitable science looking backdrop. We all do it, and we need to stop.
Could you name a scientist? Seriously, do you know one? Heard of one? A single one? Can you name anyone actively engaged in research in the United States or around the globe? Do you realize that billions of your tax dollars pay for research, and you may very well not be able to name a single scientist other than your local meteorologist, or if you’re lucky (and a child of my generation) Bill Nye the Science Guy? I’m not trying to scold anyone here. I’m also not playing high and mighty. I can’t really name any importance finance and economic people, and they are important. So please don’t take this as me preaching. All of us could stand to be a little more aware of the fields we don’t work in directly. I’m plugging science and scientists here because, well, thats what I do. If someone wants to school me in finance, please do. I could use the lessons.
Anyway, I realize that not everyone loves science, but a huge chunk of money is devoted to research each year, don’t you want to know who gets it? The name Francis Collins should mean something to you. It may or may not, but for those who don’t know he is the Director of the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the largest research funding organization in the United States. It has a fiscal year 2012 budget of more than $31 billion. But the people that are actually getting this money are largely out of the public eye. Why is that? I don’t have an answer exactly, but I can promise you it isn’t because scientists are boring.
We need to change the way we think about scientists. This is already happening in the science community itself where there are a lot of scientists who don’t want to be seen as lame. Even Collins has participated in some stereotype busting by posing for a magazine spread with Joe Perry from the band Aerosmith a few years back (Collins does play guitar himself) for a project called Rock Stars of Science. But even the best intentioned stereotype busting isn’t going to go anywhere if the only people paying attention to it are other scientists, science writers, and members of the public who already like science. We need to get the message to the people who still picture Doc Brown from Back to the Future when they think of a scientist. That being said, there are a lot of people involved with and working on correcting the stereotype. I wanted to take a moment to bring your attention to just one example, called I Am Science.
I Am Science started as a hashtag on Twitter (#iamscience). First suggested by marine biologist and science writer Kevin Zelnio, the hashtag was used to mark stories shared by scientists about the path they took to attaining their careers. It became obvious immediately that scientists are a wonderfully diverse group, finding their passion by any number of different paths. Scientists are people too. People with different backgrounds, and different interests. Sometimes wildly different interests, doing very different things but all of it is still science. They are all science.
I like I Am Science because it started with a Tweet, because it reflects the desire for scientists to try to share who they are failures and struggles included, and because it shatters the crazy mad scientist stereotype. To learn more about I Am Science read this wonderful post by Zelnio on Deep Sea News, check out the Tumblr he created to store all the tweets, if you are so inclined support I Am Science on Kickstarter (they’ve reached their goal, but can still use donations!) and watch this video.
The video was created by Mindy Weisberger and uses the song “Wicked Twisted Road” by Reckless Kelly. I hope all of this has inspired you to learn more about scientists. Look up people researching in the areas you find most interesting. Read their books. Attend their speeches or talks. Bust some stereotypes.
The Guardian’s Take On The Three Little Pigs
The Guardian’s recent advertisement promoting open journalism is brilliant, while still leaving me asking “what the what was that actually about?” First thing’s first, let’s define open journalism. This is actually harder than you’d think because lately just about everything is “open” – open news, open media, open source journalism. The idea is essentially that because the majority of people now get their news online people who are not trained as journalists play a larger role in reporting the news, discussing events, and revealing truth and details in stories. Now you need to see the advertisement. So here you go:
Obviously, I understand what they are doing. They are taking a well known and beloved story, one the is very approachable and showing how it would be covered if it happened as an actual news event today. This is brilliant because it pulls elements of how current events like the uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, and Syria or Occupy Wall Street broke in the media and injects them into a story everyone is so familiar with. It is totally amusing to see a fresh take on this classic tale, but also to see the power shift in how a story is told from a writer crafting a tale to the public changing the ending.
I like the ad, a lot. I think it very effectively promotes the idea that the public can play a huge role in how stories are covered online and in the media. However, having watched it multiple times now I can honestly say I don’t know any more about open journalism at The Guardian. How does The Guardian encourage open journalism, what do they do with it, what kind of access will the public have, etc.? I don’t know, the ad doesn’t say anything about The Guardian’s actual policies.
Is the ad effective? It will certainly get the public’s attention. It will get people talking about open journalism. It will get people talking about The Guardian. While it does show people changing the tide of the story, it doesn’t explain open journalism for people who aren’t already familiar with it. It doesn’t tell you anything about how The Guardian intends to embrace open journalism either. Still, I think that the ad is intended to wow, and in that way it succeeds.
I’d like to see The Guardian follow this ad up with more information about open journalism and what they intend to do with it. But as it stands, the ad is a good example of how to get through to people, how to move people, and how to promote something in a way that will both delight people and leave them thinking.
History of the Scientific Book and Journal
Every Monday afternoon, I go to Narnia. At least that is what it feels like to me. In the post I wrote about the book Blood Work, I mentioned that I am taking a class on the history of the scientific book and journal. I’ve been asked to elaborate on what we do in that class, which I’m happy to do because it is easily one of my favorite courses I’ve taken.
The course is offered through the History of Science Department here at UW, and is taught by Robin Rider. We meet in the special collections department of UW’s Memorial Library. The reason I equate going to class with going to Narnia is because special collections is accessible by a single elevator, separate from all the others, which is the only one that goes all the way up to the ninth floor. Special collections is gorgeous. When you step off the elevator into this magical land it is all glass and dark wood with soothing low lights and the books, oh the books. For me, short of my own library complete with floor to ceiling bookshelves and a ladder to ride around and find things, special collections is as good as a library is going to get.
What I love most about the class is that it gives me the ability to just completely nerd out for a few hours. There is something I love about holding a book in my hands, I felt it when reading Science Ink a few weeks ago, and I feel it every time I get to handle the class materials. A few weeks ago in class we got to see the library’s copy of Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the structure of the human body). I was pretty awe struck, to actually get to see for yourself something from so long ago that was so important in its time was amazing to me.
Two years ago I was an intern at a science journal (BioTechniques) and was lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of the editorial decision making and publication processes as the journal was put together each month. I found getting to handle copies of the Philosophical Transactions (including the first one published!) of the Royal Society and the Memoirs of France’s Academy of Sciences particularly interesting as early examples of journal writing. There is just something about getting to turn those yellowed pages myself that thrills me. Nerd alert, I know.
There are a lot of issues from back then, when the conventions of printing and publishing were just coming to be, that are still worth debate today. For instance in preparing for my next class meeting I was just reading about the issue of author anonymity in writing. Now, for the most part I believe that putting your name on something is a good way to evoke trust in what you say – at least you are owning it. However, at the same time I see why there are people out there (some wonderful science bloggers come to mind) who choose to operate under a pseudonym. Safety in the wake of backlash against what you say (extreme or not) was an issue back then (ahem, Galileo) and it remains one today. Writers – no matter what you choose to write, scientific paper, blog post, etc. – open themselves up to criticism which can and does escalate. I find it interesting that so many centuries later, claiming individual ownership over words would still be an unsettled issue.
I enjoy that in my last semester of grad school I am being exposed to so many wonderful pieces of science history, but also to the ideas, procedures, and processes that go into creating a printed work. We got to tour the Silver Buckle Press, which is located in Memorial Library, during class. I had no idea UW had a collection of old printing presses, let alone that they were set up in a working print shop on campus. I even got to print something myself, which believe me was fun. For me, this class is about incorporating new experiences and ideas with things I already knew or had at least heard of in some way. It is like taking a step deeper into the world of the written word, and so far it has been amazing.
I’m taking this class as an elective, and I would recommend it. The downsides are that the readings sometimes take more effort than a few clicks of the mouse to get to, and special collections is cold sometimes. Otherwise the professor is enthusiastic, the course work isn’t particularly heavy, and I’ve learned a lot.
Alex the Parrot’s Last Addition Experiments
Last year while taking a class on human and animal relationships I learned about Alex the African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). At the time, Alex had already passed away (he died in 2007) but he was still renowned for his performance in cognition experiments conducted by psychologist Irene Pepperburg of Harvard University. I was thinking a lot about animal cognition back then, and I was impressed by what Alex did so I wrote a short post about his skills. We humans like to think of ourselves as elite, but too often we underestimate the abilities of other species.
The reason I bring up Alex is because I recently read this Nature News article about a new paper published by Pepperburg in the journal Animal Cognition (behind a pay wall, sorry) describing her last experiments with Alex on addition. The newly published paper describes Alex’s ability to successfully add together arabic numerals (the ones we use) up to eight. He was also able to come up with the total number of objects separated under three different cups. The experiments were still being conducted when Alex died, however Pepperburg says there was enough statistically significant evidence to suggest that Alex was really doing addition.According to Ewen Callaway’s Nature News article, when asked “how many total?” in response to questions like 3+4 or 4+2 Alex chose the right answer nine out of 12 times. When presented sequentially with three sets of objects underneath three cups, Alex was able to total the objects correctly eight out of 10 times. It used to be believed that the ability to understand the numerical value of a set was dependent on language, and thus a specifically human characteristic.
To date, Alex and a chimpanzee named Sheba are the only non-human primates that have been able to successfully perform addition. While two examples isn’t exactly a lot, the research is exciting because it demonstrates that a higher level of thinking is possible in other species. So are we headed for a planet of the parrots? I’m going to go with no, but it is still very cool to see what Alex was capable of doing.
Book Review: Blood Work
I recently made a trip home, and decided to grab a book from the UW Bookstore to keep me company on my flight. I felt like it was time to read another piece of narrative non-fiction, so I picked up Blood Work by Holly Tucker. The book is about the first human experiments conducted on blood transfusion. I have no background of any kind in studying blood transfusion or in studying European and medical history in the time period of the 1660’s. However, I was drawn to the book because I was intrigued by the way it was marketed on the jacket as, “a tale of medicine and murder in the scientific revolution.” It seemed like something that would keep me awake on my nighttime flight.
As it turned out, Blood Work was a perfect compliment to the material we are covering in my History of the Scientific Book and Journal class this semester. Of all the classes that I’ve ever taken, this is one of my favorites. It is in the special collections of the UW Library and we get to handle the real texts, but I digress. We were just looking at early copies of the Philosophical Transactions, the publication of London’s Royal Society and the Memoirs of France’s Academy of Sciences. These two publications, and their respective societies are an important part of Tucker’s book. Publication is the means of spreading information, and getting into the journal of a national science organization was the premier means of getting attention for your work – critical for the early blood experiments.
Blood Work tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Denis one of the first medical doctors to experiment with animal to human blood transfusions. At the time, blood transfusion was extremely controversial because medical knowledge was conflicted about what exactly blood did in the body, what it was made of, and how it connected to the essence or soul of a person. There were fears that transfusing animal blood into humans would create horrible hybrid human animals. This resulted in two strong camps, those in favor of blood transfusion who believed it had the power to cure a variety of problems including mental illness, and those of the traditional way of thinking who wanted nothing to do with blood transfusions. Despite the controversy there were researchers engaging in these experiments anyway, and Denis was one of Paris’ most famous (or infamous depending on how you see it.)
What I liked most about this book was that while well researched and factual about science and the time period, the narrative was extremely strong. This is a vivid story with great characters struggling not just to further medical research but also to make a name for themselves, with their reputations and all that goes along with them at stake. You will learn a lot of history, not just medically, but of the time period. You certainly won’t be bored by details. The narrative is well crafted and engaging.
I loved seeing the work that went into researching this story. You can tell Tucker really did her homework to try to unravel the mystery of what happened to the patient in Denis’ most famous animal to human blood transfusion. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the patient dies and it calls into question the safety of blood transfusions. The incident serves as proof for those medical doctors opposed to blood transfusion research to have the experiments, and thus Denis, shut down. However, there is a question about whether the transfusion killed the patient, or more sinister means were employed in a conspiracy to tank the research. The incident resulted in blood transfusion itself going on trial.
This book was enthralling. I was reading in a busy environment, and had to put it down several times out of the necessity of moving around and traveling. I was able to keep coming back to it though, because my interest was peaked enough to want to find out what happened in the end. This story has mystery, a conspiracy, and science. I was certainly hooked. This isn’t really a fun read, not the kind of thing you’d want to take to the gym or the beach, but it is definitely interesting and worth the time if you’d like to learn something new about research in the 17th century, and be entertained while doing it.
One of the things that left me thinking after I’d put the book down was Tucker’s epilogue where she compares the blood transfusion experiments with modern day stem cell research. Blood transfusion is now a standard medical procedure (though not interspecies, we’ve learned that human to human blood transfusions are the way to go because the body can reject the blood of another species). However, it was greatly feared when it was first proposed, and that fear set the research back years. I thought the corollary to how stem cell research has been perceived by certain groups was a strong one, and it certainly got me thinking about how research that might seem “extreme” these days may be viewed in the future. Overall, I’m glad I read it.
The Final Countdown (Part II) The Speakers
This semester I decided to run a segment called The Final Countdown (I mean, really) to force me to take the time every month to reflect on my graduate experience and think about my time here in Madison. This month I want to talk about the different people I’ve gotten to meet through my grad program here. There are a lot of awesome people that I got to either hear lecture, grab coffee with, or ask questions about how avoid being awful at what I do. I’m very grateful for these experiences. Honestly, exposure to people of this caliber is one of the things I think I got the most out of in my time here.
My first semester at UW the science writer in residence was Jennifer Oulette, whose blog Cocktail Party Physics is a part of the Scientific American blog network. I got to hear her speak about becoming known as a physics writer, without any formal educational background in physics. I’ve always steered away from physics and math as a writer, but she was encouraging that if you put in the time to educate yourself you can write about complex topics in a meaningful way.
Washington Post features writer Manuel Roig-Franzia spoke in several of my classes when he visited UW about what makes a good feature, and how he goes about getting the story. What I took away from listening to him, was that you have to put in the time. If you want to write a good feature, you have to invest yourself in it, otherwise you won’t get everything out of the story that you could have.
Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which I highly recommend) came to UW to speak because her book was chosen as the Go Big Read selection for the campus for the 2010-2011 school year. She gave a special talk in the Journalism school, and I found her process for staying organized and keeping all her information straight as she was working on a book of this magnitude really interesting.
While I try hard not to delve into politics, I found a lot of encouragement to keep doing what I’m doing in a talk by Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Politico. I went to this talk at a time when I was feeling totally inept as a writer and having serious doubts if I could cut it in this program. VandeHei gave me a big boost when he spoke about the future of journalism, and all the opportunities that lay ahead.
I got the opportunity to have lunch with Sheri Fink, Pulitzer Prize winner for her coverage of misconduct in hospitals in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. I was inspired by the strength journalists must have to chase a story no one wants to be real, to be committed to the facts, to the truth.
One of my favorite experiences in the program thus far was having coffee with Bill Blakemore of ABC News. I didn’t blog about talking to Bill, but I was so impressed not just by his long, prestigious career but also by how open and honest he was in talking with us. He was taking notes during the conversation, and writing down little tidbits of what we were saying for future reference, he made me feel like even me with all my stumbles along the way had a valuable opinion.
Last semester the science writer in residence was John Rennie, former editor and chief of Scientific American, a blogger for the PLoS Network, and a professor at NYU. Like Bill he also took the time to sit and get coffee with a group of students. It feels as though every time I start to get discouraged about the program and my abilities, a great writer appears to convince me that journalism isn’t dead and I’m not out here chasing a dead end future.
This semester I got to talk to Mark Schaefer, author of the Tao of Twitter and pick his brain about how to market yourself online. So far my life sciences communication class on social media has exposed me to some seriously skilled people when it comes to making the most of social media. Last week we also got to talk with John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, and get his opinions on branding and marketing online. I was again amazed that people who are so busy, would take the time to talk to a class of students. Did I mention that Mark and John both spoke to us for free? Classy. Seriously.
Let’s not forget that I also got to hear (though not see, unfortunately) the President of the United States Barack Obama give a speech on the library mall here at UW. The President. Even with no view, it was still a great experience.
There have also been great people here in Madison who have taken time to work with students, and I’ve greatly enjoyed meeting them. This includes Brennan Nardi, Editor of Madison Magazine (and alum from my program), and Bill Lueders, formerly of the Isthmus and now with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
Hopefully I didn’t forget anyone. Members of my cohort, please remind me if I did! It is quite a diverse, and amazing list of individuals. I’ve gotten so much out of getting to meet each of them, and I feel very lucky that UW-Madison afforded me the opportunity to do so. One of my biggest regrets in my undergrad was not taking advantage of all the opportunities to be exposed to different types of thinkers. I vowed not to do the same in my graduate experience. With this bunch, I think I succeeded.
Science For Six-Year-Olds: Hurricanes
Science For Six-Year-Olds is a recurring segment on Science Decoded for Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class at Lincoln-Hubbard elementary school. This year in first grade we’ve also done an experiment with butter, talked about sugar maple trees, and learned a song about the states of matter.
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Hello first graders! Mrs. Podolak tells me you are studying weather in science, so I wanted to share with you some information about an extreme weather event, called a hurricane. Who remembers when hurricane Irene hit New Jersey on August 28, 2011? What happened? Did any of you have to leave vacations at the beach? Did the power go out? Did your basement flood? At my house (Mrs. Podolak’s house too!) our basement flooded, and we spent a lot of time pumping all the water back out. My flight to Wisconsin to go back to school was cancelled, and I was stuck in New Jersey for a few extra days.
A hurricane is a big storm that forms in the ocean and brings high winds and a lot of rain to the coast when it makes land. According to the National Hurricane Center, a hurricane needs specific things to happen in order to form including, a pre-existing weather disturbance, warm tropical oceans, moisture, and winds. If these conditions all happen at the right time, they can combine to make a hurricane. Hurricanes occur in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico and can move in different directions, heading west toward Texas, or north toward where you are in New Jersey. Many of these storms don’t hit land, but some (like Irene) do.
Storms that form over the ocean can vary in strength. A tropical depression is a system of clouds and thunderstorms with maximum winds of 38 miles per hour (mph). Stronger than that is a tropical storm, a system of thunderstorms with maximum winds of 39-73 mph. The strongest storm is a hurricane, an extreme tropical weather system with strong thunderstorms and winds of 74 mph or higher. There are different categories of hurricane with a category one having the lowest winds, and a category five having the highest. Hurricane Irene got up to a category three, but when it hit New Jersey it had lessened to a category one. But, a category one hurricane can still do a lot of damage, especially when rivers get too full, and flood over their banks. Did any of you see the footage of flooding with Hurricane Irene on the news? This is what it looked like:
While hurricanes can do a lot of damage, there are things that you and your family can do to make sure that everyone stays safe. The National Hurricane Center recommends that at the beginning of hurricane season (June 1 – November 30) make sure you have fresh batteries and a supply of food and water for emergencies on hand. You can tune into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) weather radio to check for updates on weather conditions. The most important thing is to listen to local officials, and if you find yourself in an evacuation zone (area that you have to leave) that you follow instructions. Do you remember New Jersey Governor Chris Christie closing the beaches and asking people to evacuate?
During extreme weather conditions like hurricanes you are going to want to make sure you have the right kind of clothing. During a snowstorm like a blizzard, you would want to have warm clothes like sweaters or lined pants, a jacket, snowpants, gloves, a hat, a scarf and boots. What kind of clothes do you think you would want during a hurricane? Remember, hurricanes are wet and windy and generally happen during the summer months.
For more information about what to do during extreme weather conditions, you can check out the National Weather Service. If you have any questions about hurricanes let me know! I hope you all enjoy learning about weather.
On Being A Social Media Ninja: Tips From Mark Schaefer
We live in the future. While I’m still waiting for my hover car, there are many other examples I could give you about the amazing technical advances that make me feel like we have tremendous opportunities at our finger tips, if we just know how to harness their power. One of the ways I think we are already living in the future is with the power of social media, particularly Twitter and blogging. While I’m relatively active on Twitter and try to keep this blog up to date and interesting, my skills in this arena are far from the super stealth ninja moves of many of the people who have seized the opportunities to network and build an audience through social media.
This semester I am taking a life sciences communication class on social media. I recently had an opportunity to learn from one such social media ninja, when my class interviewed Mark Schaefer (@markwshaefer) over Skype. Schaefer, who was recently named by Forbes to a list of the top 50 social media influencers and named by Tweetsmarter as Twitter user of the year for 2011, is a successful marketing consultant, professor and author. For my class we read his book, the Tao of Twitter, and then got to ask him questions about how to make the most of the Internet, and get our foot in the door in social media.
The main thing I took away from talking with Schaefer is the importance of having substantial content that supports the online persona you build for yourself. It is one thing to just be active on Twitter and networking, but if you don’t have content to support what you claim to stand for, you aren’t going to reach a significant level of interaction. He said people that really have the power on the Internet are the ones that have content that they are creating and moving through the system, which I feel like I’ve definitely witnessed in the science writing community on Twitter. The core of my Twitter experience thus far has been reading blogs, and sharing links to interesting blog posts written by others.
Another thing Schaefer shared that I found interesting was that there is value in blogging even if you don’t have a high number of followers (that you know about at least, because as I’ve said over and over again I don’t know where the hits on this blog come from). I am winding down my time here at UW, and am starting to look for a job. I thought he really made a great point when he said that a good blog can be a great selling point in an interview, and can make an interview last much longer so a potential employer gets a better sense of your skills and ability. He said that even if you don’t have many people reading your blog, you can still show a potential employer or colleagues what you can do, what you can write, how you think, and what you are passionate about. I knew that employers would see my blog, but I hadn’t really considered what a great opportunity (or shortcoming, depending on how you see it) the blog could be.
A few other tips I took away from Shaefer include:
- You have to figure out what you offer, then you can figure out how best to try to communicate and network online.
- Show your whole social media footprint in one place, link to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn so employers can easily see what you do.
- Twitter is a global experience so you should be culturally sensitive, and remember that even on an individual level customers may consume social media in different ways.
- Find your own originality and your own voice, don’t try to just mimic what you see other people doing online.
- Show critical interest in things that are important to you, be a part of something you actually care about.
- Commenting on other people’s blogs is one of the best ways to get involved in a community online.
- The best Twitter profiles will tell what a person wants to gain. You have to put up what you are after so that people can offer genuine helpfulness (I already made this change!)
- Personal connections turn into business connections, so including some personal tweets can be seriously useful.
I started this post by talking about how we are already living in the future. I can’t think of a better example of that then the fact that I got to discuss how to improve my involvement in social media by Skyping with one of the most effective Twitter users out there right now. This is the way of the future, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to talk to someone like Schaefer. My goal for this semester (aside from being a ninja) is to comment on other blogs which is something I never do, and really know that I should in an attempt to improve commenting and interaction here on Science Decoded and on Twitter. I need to start talking to people, rather than just talking AT the Internet. It would also be nice to, you know, find a job. Think I can do it?