Science Blogging Conference

After three years, I'm learning how to do it right!

Science Blogs have been such a success for Seed Magazine and others that they are changing the "news landscape" of the Web. Science bloggers are helping others to get started. For the next two days, I'm at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Sigma Xi facility in Research Triangle Park to learn new skills, topics, and approaches.

Toronto STC, January 8: Simplified Technical English

One of our goals as communicators is to write technical materials that people can understand. And one of the ways to do that is to simplify our language. Simplified Technical English is one such approach. The aim is to make material easier to read and easier to translate. On January 8, Barry Braster is telling the Toronto Society for Technical Communication about how to use Simplified Technical English. Here's the blurb:

Barry Braster, Tedopres International

In today's business, clear and consistent authoring has become a necessity: English has become the main language used in technical documentation throughout the world, but can be difficult to understand due to its many forms and complexity: complex sentence structures, multiple meanings and synonyms easily result in confusion. In addition, many readers' command of English can fall below the level of those who created the documentation (technical writers and engineers).

About Tedopres International

Tedopres has been offering professional technical documentation services since 1974. Tedopres specializes in all assets that come with technical documentation, including technical translation in over 40 languages, technical illustrations as well as software development to support the creation and management of technical documentation.

We meet in the Burgundy Room at the North York Memorial Hall, 5110 Yonge St., Toronto, at 7 p.m. General Admission is $5; STC Members attend for free.


UPDATE: Due to unforseen circumstances, the meeting could not be held. I think there will be a webcast instead.

Completed tech pubs judging

About twenty-five people got together at Front Runner Publishing Solutions to judge thirty paper entries and six online entries for the Toronto STC 2007 technical publications contest. My partner and I judged three anonymous examples of online help in the online portion of the contest. They were good, average, and excellent. For each one we worked independently through a four-page evaluation sheet with detailed questions about the structure, content, writing, and other aspects of the set of help files (focus, indexing, search capability, navigation clues, use of graphics, etc.) Then we discussed our distances and rationalized them. On the whole, our judgements were similar although each of us had "hot buttons" where we were more demanding of high quality. The products were quite different.

The competition manager will take our results, see which entries get awards, and re-unite the entries with the names of their authors.

For my part, I had the leisure to examine what makes a good system and see examples of good or bad help systems. I talked with my friends and colleagues and enjoyed our mid-day lunch at a local restaurant. It's an investment of time but it had its rewards. Fhe contestants get a detailed analysis of their work with constructive criticism; good entries are recognized and that's echoed back to employers; and the reputation of Toronto STC as an active chapter is secured. And it continues a tradition: we had the first or second online publications competition in North America, and we're still continuing it. The competition manager gets leadership experience. Truly, a good time is had by all.

Faith-based schools?

The inimitable Q_pheevr has observations on the Canadian Conservative Party's campaign promise to fund more kinds of faith-based schools.

LavaCon and PMI GNO 2007 Professional Development Summit

I'm going to New Orleans! Any science bloggers there? On Saturday, I'm taking the option of helping the community, at a Habitat for Humanity site or elsewhere.

LavaCon® is partnering with the Project Management Institute® Greater New Orleans Chapter to co-host a Professional Development Summit in New Orleans, October 27–30, 2007.

The fifth annual LavaCon will present proven best practices in the fields of technical communication and technical communication management, including strategies for choosing technology platforms, migrating to XML and content management, reducing training and translation costs, and more.

The www.lavacon.org site is currently down, proving that even project managers have real life happen to them. If you're interested, run a search on the Web site and then look at cached pages, or call 1-866-302-5774, ext 201.

Update: the link is working again.

Teaching evolution

The McGill Journal of Education has a good article on why teaching science and evolution is important and how to do it. Here's the article, "The Evolution-Creation Wars: Why Teaching More Science Just is Not Enough" (PDF file), by Massimo Pigliucci of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Abstract:

The creation-evolution ���controversy��� has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

En fran��ais:

LA DISCORDE ��VOLUTION-CR��ATIONNISME : POURQUOI UN ENSEIGNEMENT ACCRU DES SCIENCES NE SUFFIT PAS R��SUM��. La �� controverse �� cr��ation-��volution existe depuis plus d���un si��cle. Je soutiens que le seul fait d���enseigner plus de sciences n���am��liorera probablement pas la situation : nous devons appr��hender la controverse comme faisant partie d���un probl��me plus vaste li�� �� la r��ception de la population vis-��-vis des pseudosciences et nous devons y r��pondre en enseignant le fonctionnement des sciences en tant que m��thode. La pens��e critique est difficile �� enseigner, mais les ��ducateurs peuvent compter sur l���augmentation des preuves issues de la neurobiologiequi montrent comment le cerveau apprend ou ��choue �� apprendre.

I quote from last year's Reason Retreat:

Dr. Pigliucci is a Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he teaches evolutionary biology and philosophy of science. His research is on the evolution of genotype-environment interactions, i.e. on questions of nature vs. nurture.

This You-Tube video shows the U.S. evolution-creationism controversy in Lisa Simpson's school.

LOLcats: Evolution Cat

A surviving species can be compared to a cat walking along a fence. If the conditions are the same along a latitude, at a certain altitude, or going forward in time, the fence is straight, and the cat must go with it or fall off. If the conditions change and the fence turns, the cat must follow it as long as possible. If there's only one spot with the right conditions, the animal must stay on that fence-post.

Natural selection does not enforce change. Sometimes it enforces continued sameness. As long as conditions are constant, the organism stays constant. If the adaptive landscape has a stable peak at for a certain organism, that organism will reproduce unchanged for as long as the peak lasts. Any change away from the stable form means a change away from fitness.

Remember that other organisms can change the conditions of an environment without climate or other factors changing. For example, a faster wolf can select for a faster antelope.

Evolution has neither an inherent push upwards nor any inherent direction. It is a reaction to current conditions. As time goes on, there is more time for some organisms to become more highly derived, and that's what we notice. But the bulk of the earth's biomass is always bacteria and the average lifeform remains a bacterium.

Change is coming

There's a video you should see: "Shift Happens" by Karl Fisch on Albino Black Sheep.

UW-Madison wins concrete canoe contest again

The University of Wisconsin at Madison has won the concrete canoe contest for five years in a row. Each year the competition gets stiffer.

UW-Madison earned first-place finishes in the men's and women's endurance races and the women's sprint, and third-place finishes in the men's and co-ed sprints, for a total of 22.9 points.

At the awards ceremony, the team learned that it tied for first place (with the University of Nevada, Reno) for its design paper, earned third place for its formal oral presentation, and received fourth place in the final product category. "It came down to every minor little detail of the competition," says Blodgett. "It truly was a great showing by all teams involved."

DNA play structure

Here's how to make science education painless:


These South Asian children are absorbing the basic concepts of DNA structure as they play. I imagine that when they get to their first serious biology class, they won't have any trouble understanding the double helix.

STC's 2007 annual conference in Minneapolis

My friends and colleagues who have employers to send them or who found the money themselves are back from days of concentrated Technical Communication learning in Minneapolis. The conference had six content streams:

• Designing and Assessing User Experiences
• Developing and Delivering Content
• Producing and Publishing Information
• Managing People, Projects and Business
• Developing Your Skills and Promoting Your Profession
• Applying Theory and Research to Practice

I would have liked to go, both for the conference and to glimpse an interesting city, but I'm saving my pennies for training closer to home.

Alliance for Science contest winners

The Alliance for Science sponsored an essay for students to write about "Why I would want my doctor to have studied evolution."

CORRECTION: Coincidentally, after the topic was chosen, one Michael Egnor stated that knowledge of evolution was useless in the medcial profession, although as a doctor he should know better.

The winners of the national high school essay contest are

• First place, Gregory Simonian, a 10th-grade student in Los Angeles
• Second place, Merve Fejzula, a 12th-grade student in Englewood, New Jersey
• Third place, Shobha Topgi, an 11th-grade student in Aurora Illinois
• Fourth Place, Linda Zhou, a 9th-grade student in Hackensack, New Jersey

You can see more details and read the essays here (hat tip to Pharyngula for linking to them first.

Evolution answers

This is a good summary of answers to criticisms of evolution.

Apes of Wrath: evolution and human origins

Remote Central discusses Evolution and human origins.

Scientific literacy in Canada

Canada's students are doing all right. In scientific literacy, they came 5th out of 41 countries, after Finland, Japan, China, and Korea. But adults -- fewer than 20% of Canadian adults up to the age of 65 are considered to be scientifically literate. I view some of those statistics with a jaundiced eye. Both of my parents were intelligent, voracious readers. Our home had books about evolution, books about the Aztecs and the Maya, the Encyclopedia Britannica, physics and radio and carpentry books, and an ever-changing assortment of books from the library. Yet my mother -- who had to drop out of school after Grade 8 to go to work -- was counted in alarmist literacy statistics as functionally illiterate because of her low level of formal schooling. The fact that she was an A+ student-- well, never mind. My father, a high-school dropout, taught me Ohm's Law and how to read circuit diagrams when I was eight.

If "functional" means anything it ought to mean something about the level at which someone functions and not be a formality. Some of those "scientific functional illiterates" can take anything apart and put it back together working; analyze the stock market enough to do pretty well, thank you; explore a mine; invent ergonomic gadgets that would be the envy of an industrial engineer; plan a farm's crop production; run a department store; and join in lively dinnertime conversation about scientific discoveries. They aren't ignorant. That being said, here's a link to the article about the state of science learning in Canada, published in April, 2007.

Can a science geek help save the world?

Of course. We can all help. And, as blogfish points out, PZ Myers is helping to bring awareness of science to the public. And so is blogfish.

How to give an academic talk

Rule #1: Don't put too much text on your slides.


Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for the link to "How to give an academic talk".

A billion dollars wasted for abstinence-only sex education

President Bush could have looked to Canada for a bad example. The only province to have abstinence-only sex education was Saskatchewan, which also had the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. He could have asked me. I would have reminded him that we can't even stop people from littering, so how are we going to stop them from having sex?

Now a big study in the U.S. finds that pushing abstinence doesn't work. It found that there was no difference in number of sexual partners, age of first having sex, or use of contraception between students who get standard sex education, which includes birth control and condom use, and abstinence-only sex education, which does not cover contraception. I guess the little dears learn through other channels. I conclude that Canadian students listen to their teachers better, since standard sex education seems to result in fewer babies.

Oh, yes: other studies have shown that there's no difference in sexually transmitted diseases between the two groups, either. About the only way that abstinence students are ahead is that they're more likely to have anal sex on the grounds that it doesn't count. Now there's a target worth spending your education dollars on!

Build a paper pelvis!

Activities for students: print this PDF file, then cut out the pieces and assemble a three-dimensional model of the human pelvis. Good for rainy days, those in-school detentions, or home-schoolers. Designed by H. Thewissen.