In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I’m going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I’m going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize:
Blogs are online “diaries” that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science bloggers P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula; http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/), Grrl Scientist (Living the Scientific Life; http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/), and John Lynch (Stranger Fruit; http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/) answer your questions about how blogging works, setting one up, finding things to write about, and using the medium for your classes, for research, or for educating the public.
Cool, hey? Even better, afterwards there will be a ten-round boxing match between me and John, with GrrlScientist doing the honors as the card girl (nah, not really…all three of us will probably just buy each other beers and get embarrassingly sloppy.)
The real coolness, though, is in the schedule: there are some great talks and posters going on at this meeting, and once I get the panel out of the way, I am going to thoroughly enjoy myself, learning new stuff. And yes, of course, I will be blogging the SICB meeting.
I am so jealous! SICB is the best meeting of them all.
So, is there going to be a podcast or a video file of the session? How can one not blog about a blogging session?
Ah! That’s so exciting! I will be there presenting a poster on
ChristmasCephalopodmas tree worms, so I’ll have to drop by to see you.Hey cool. I hope I can get answers then to some questions I emailed you a couple of weeks ago, but never got a response to. I imagine you get a ton of email, and mine got lost somewhere. Anyway, I’m interested in trying a class blog like your classes, and would like to learn about setting one up and the best ways to use it – and this session may hold the answers I want!
BTW, when and where exactly is this workshop scheduled? I don’t see any spatial or temporal coordinates listed in the brief paragraph describing the event. Can you tell us when this is happening?
As for me – I’m coauthor on the following talk:
Jan. 5 14:00 Size Matters: Male mating tactics in a prosimian primate, slender loris Loris tardigradus
I’m really looking forward to this meeting which I have heard a lot of good things about but never managed to attend thus far.
Madhu
What fun! I’ll be giving a talk at SICB, but I’m not telling you which one.
I think the panel is on the evening of the fourth.
Sorry that I haven’t gotten back to you — I get a couple hundred email messages a day (not counting the spam and the comment announcements), and I can’t keep up. I should say a few things about integrating blogging and teaching at the panel, definitely.
And, just for the sake of keeping score, do tell us about every one of the intelligent design/cretionism posters or presentations you find. In the interests of being fair and transparent, I want to give fair credit where it is due . . . or let them hoist on their own petards.
coturnix, I second your emotion! Videos! Podcasts! Yes!
shit! I almost always make it to SICB, but not this year. Hoist one for me. Maybe 2.
Sounds like the time of year to leave MN for AZ. While you’re in Phoenix, you should check out 4 Peaks Brewery (the main one’s in Tempe, and there’s a restaurant in northern Phoenix/Scottsdale), which has many excellent brews (try the Kiltlifter if you like ales) and good food.
Question: how hard would it for a non-biologist like myself to wander in and catch your panel for free?
I would love to go to SICB and talk about my cephalopods this year, but 1) I have no grant money for such an adventure at the moment, and 2) I’ve gone to exactly one SICB meeting (Chicago, 2001) and had a lousy time despite seeing lots of friends that I don’t normally see. I think the reason for hating the Chicago SICB was…well, it was a meeting in an expensive hotel in CHICAGO in EARLY JANUARY. Yuck! Miami in January? Fine. Chicago? Not so much.
I much prefer summer meetings, but all the field biologists bleat heartily (and understandably) about summer meetings interfering with their field work, so I suspect SICB will never change…
Excellent! Will you be sticking around for the socials that SICB usually has, or are you just there for the talk?
Of course! I’m staying for the whole meeting, and I’m really looking forward to listening to the science more than my brief evening of babbling.
Welcome, welcome to Phoenix, P.Z. I’m really pleased that you are coming in Jan. (As an old east-coaster, yeah, the summers suck, but you don’t have to shovel sunshine.) I hope there are lots of good speakers on science v. christianism and other -isms, this being a very conservative state gradually getting more sophisticated as technology, science, and education begin to grow. Unfortunately, AZ seems to plunk down as 48th or 49th in monies spent on children’s education, just ahead of Mississippi! We need people who can talk clearly about the need for all kids to be adequately educated–that knowledge is power to our children. I’m not a scientist and will not attend, but I hope you can give us a wrap-up of what happens.
You should make squiddy t-shirts and hand them out. lol.
I loved SICB in Chicago 2001. Paul Sereno gave the Big Lecture, I got to meet a lot of people I only read about, I got some very positive comments on my poster from the Top People, and I stayed an additional week exploring Chicago with my brother (who was at U of C at the time).
What exactly is “integrative biology”?
Excellent, hopefully I’ll bump into you at some point. If you see someone with sideburns that would do Thomas Henry Huxley proud wandering between biomechanics talks (or talking about arboreal snake locomotion), that’ll be me.