Science Communicators of North Carolina

North Carolina is going to be the proud host of the ScienceWriters 2012 meeting, Oct. 26-30 at the Raleigh Convention Center and environs.  http://www.sciencewriters2012.org/  I hope all of you can be involved in some way. (Program details, so far:http://www.sciencewriters2012.org/about)

Please plan to attend the “New Horizons in Science” http://casw.org/new-horizons portion of the meeting on Sunday and Monday to which everyone is welcome, and  also consider participating in the members-only National Association of Science Writers (NASW) workshops on Saturday. (See 2011 Saturday program here - http://www.sciencewriters2011.org/)

Here’s your ticket: The NASW is soliciting workshop proposals.  If your pitch is accepted, you get in for free AND you get a nifty ribbon on your nametag, even if you aren’t a member! How cool is that?

They need a 300-word proposal on some speaker or panel of speakers who might lead a discussion on the current state of science communication: new tools, best practices, new opportunities, group therapy for freelancers, etc.  Instructions are on this page:http://www.sciencewriters2012.org/  The most glaring need I’ve heard is for sessions by, for and about public information officers (PIOs), who are about a third of the membership, but never a third of the program.

The catch: To propose a workshop you need to be a member of NASW — OR you need to get one of the local NASW members to co-sponsor your proposal. (Membership details are here:  http://www.nasw.org/membership-information) You can do this!

Deadline, March 1: A 300-word idea and some proposed speakers.

If you have any questions or need to bounce ideas, please feel free to contact me or Ashley Yeager here at Duke. (Ashley.yeager@duke.edu) Both of us have been on the workshop selection panel in the past.

We’re also going to need volunteers during the entire run of the conference for all sorts of crucial and mundane tasks. Please let us know if you’d like to help there, too!

Carolina Science Café
“GlobalClimate Change: A Primer” with Dr. Orrin Pilkey
Thursday, Feb. 2, 6 p.m.
Back Bar, Top of the Hill restaurant, Chapel Hill

Is climate change a real issue? How could it impact life in North Carolina?

Dr. Orrin Pilkey addresses these questions and more during Morehead Planetarium and Science Center’s Carolina Science Cafe, held at the Back Bar (Top of the Hill restaurant, Chapel Hill) on Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. The free program is open to the public.

Pilkey specializes in coastal geology, specifically barrier islands, and studies how climate change alters shorelines in North Carolina and across the world. He is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of geology at DukeUniversity and director of  theProgram for the Study of Developed Shorelines. His most recent book, “Global Climate Change: A Primer,” was published in August 2011 and expands on his ideas about climate change and coastlines.

February’s Carolina Science Cafe featuring Orrin Pilkey was made possible through Morehead’s partnerships with the North Carolina Coastal Federation and with Sigma Xi. Carolina Science Cafe is Morehead’s series ofmonthly programs featuring noted scientists and researchers, who discuss “in the news” science topics with cafe participants. Carolina Science Cafe welcomes participants who are unfamiliar with these science topics as well as participants who already have some knowledge.

For more information:
http://bit.ly/sciencecafe
919-962-1236

You’re invited to a talk on October 4 by Michael Nielsen, who will be speaking on Doing Science in the Open. Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computation, and recently has been working on a book called Reinventing Discovery and advocating for a more open scientific culture. In this talk, he will be discussing the history of scholarly communication and collaboration, some possibilities enabled by new technologies, and ideas on how to change the culture of science and scholarship to make them more open and collaborative.

The talk will be in Love Auditorium in the LSRC (Levine Science Research Center) at 4pm on Tuesday, October 4, and will be followed by a reception just outside the auditorium. You can find more information at http://bit.ly/nielsen-oct4 and in the longer abstract/bio below. This talk is open to the public and we have a large venue, so please share information about it with anyone you think may be interested.

TITLE

Doing Science in the Open

ABSTRACT

The net is transforming many aspects of our society, from finance to friendship.  And yet scientists, who helped create the net, are extremely conservative in how they use it.  Although the net has great potential to transform science, most scientists remain stuck in a centuries-old system for the construction of knowledge.

The talk is in two parts.  In the first part, I describe some striking leading-edge projects that show how online tools can radically change and improve science.  And in the second part I discuss why these tools haven’t spread to all corners of science, and how we can change that.

In the first part, we’ll see how mass online collaboration is being used by some of the world’s top mathematicians to solve challenging mathematical problems.  These collaborations use online tools to dramatically amplify a group’s collective intelligence, and so expand our capacity to solve problems at the limit of human problem-solving ability.

I’ll also describe how online citizen science projects are enabling amateurs to make scientific discoveries.  There were early attempts to do this in the 1990s and 2000s, with projects such as SETI@Home and Clickworkers.  But while intriguing, these projects produced limited scientific outcomes.  I’ll describe a second wave of citizen science projects that live up to the early promise, and which are producing a stream of important scientific discoveries.

These examples illustrate some of the ways the net can change science. In the second part of the talk I discuss the major cultural barriers that inhibit scientists from using or developing new tools.  We’ll see that scientists have strong incentives to keep their best ideas and data secret, hoarding them against the possibility of future journal publication.  I’ll describe how we can create a much more open scientific culture, one that will truly make the net work for science.

BIO

Michael Nielsen

Michael Nielsen is an author and an advocate of open science. His book about open science, Reinventing Discovery, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2011.  Prior to his book, Michael was an internationally known scientist who helped pioneer the field of quantum computation.  He co-authored the standard text in the field, and wrote more than 50 scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American.  His work on quantum teleportation was recognized in Science Magazine’s list of the Top Ten Breakthroughs of 1998. Michael was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, was Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2008, he gave up his tenured position to work fulltime on open science.