The last two posts in this series, based on a recent paper by Ted Nield and Iain Stewart, addressed the issues of why should scientists bother communicating, and what do people in general already know about science, and geoscience in particular. Oddly, these are the most fundamental questions when it comes to science communication, but […]
SpotOn London was held this weekend at the Wellcome Trust, shockingly, in London. The name stands for Science Policy, Outreach and Tools Online, with each of these representing three individual but strongly interwoven strands during the two days. As far as conferences go, it was pretty interactive. Each session was live-streamed, and through that and […]
The last post detailed (well, briefly alluded to) the fact that this blog would shortly be having a new home, and well now it has! The European Geosciences Union have taken me under their wing along with two other bloggernauts, so I’ll be rambling on about Palaeontology over there from now on. I may nip […]
Post for the Geological Society of London’s blog covering the antics of that li’l robot so far, and geological prospects!
Shortly, this blog will be moving to a new home within the European Geosciences Union blog network! Somehow, they get the idea that a blog with the url ‘fossilsandshit’ would be appropriate for their needs. Anyway, as part of this, the blog needs to become more focussed. That means no more miscellaneous rants, no more […]
Dinosaurs. What springs to mind when they’re mentioned? The colossal sauropods? Packs of feisty feathered fiends? Or huge herds of hadrosaurs, chomping their way across the plains of long lost worlds? Most, including myself, will automatically default to any one of these archetypal images when dinosaurs come up in conversation (what, you mean it’s not […]
There was quite a stir earlier this month when UCL advertised an unpaid internship, the full series of responses of can be found here. Now it’s happened again with BG Mag, but for an editorial/managerial position. The pay? Lunch and travel for Zones 1-3, for a permanent full-time position. Full details are here, and screenshotted below […]
Twitter is awesome. Users tweet over 340 million times a day, and the information load coming through it, and the speed at which it comes from the real world, makes it incredibly addictive as a social media or microblogging tool. In terms of the functions it offers though, how much is really understood? Everyone knows […]
Recently, an article appeared in Naturwissenschaften, with the title ‘Deep Diving Dinosaurs’, with zero content about dinosaurs and being instead about their distant relatives, the ichthyosaurs. Naturally, being a miffed Brit, I decided to write a letter to the journal’s publisher, Springer. Here’s the mighty response from one of their Editorial Directors: Thank you Dr. […]
Recently, Sherry Nouraini created an intriguing poll regarding the ‘multiple personalities’ of favouriting a tweet on Twitter. From a personal viewpoint, I use it similarly to the ‘Like’ function on Twitter, although anecdotal evidence combined with this poll suggest a wide variety of different uses. However, the sample size for this previous study was quite […]