Platforms such as Twitter seem to increasingly foster and encourage unhealthy, vitriolic and hostile behaviours. These often transpire as forms of ‘outrage’ culture, virtue-signalling, mobbing, and cancel culture, none of which seem particularly virtuous. I woke up today to see that even tea, yes, tea, has now become a victim of an online mob. I […]
In my many years on Twitter, I have seen a lot of interesting things. Back when I first started some 9 years ago, it used to be, well, fun. People would joke, share, and generally enjoy engaging as part of a community. We used to go viral, discussing and celebrating the things we loved. Now […]
The logic that animates both cancel culture and broken windows is fundamentally shallow and also fundamentally fear-based. It acts on the assumption that something that’s not necessarily harmful in and of itself but that somehow has the flavor of harmfulness — be it an edgy tweet or some tipsy neighbors hanging out on the stoop […]
Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous week. Palaeontology news Brom et al: Body-size increase in crinoids following the end-Devonian mass extinction. Field and Hsiang: A North American stem turaco, and the complex biogeographic history of modern birds. […]
This is adapted from our recent paper in F1000 Research, entitled “A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review.” Due to its rather monstrous length, I’ll be posting chunks of the text here in sequence over the next few weeks to help disseminate it in more easily digestible bites. Enjoy! This section is […]
This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened on Twitter. A direct series of insults towards researchers for expressing their view on a matter relating to ‘Open Science’. Any other idiots out there that feel like exposing themselves today? pic.twitter.com/i3GdToGSdR — Jordan Anaya (@OmnesResNetwork) May 13, 2017 Yeah, that’s not helping. […]
So a few months ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to give a talk at the Nature Careers Expo in London about how to use social media to build scientific communities. As part of this, there was a short panel discussion afterwards with myself and Sarah Blackford from the Society for Experimental Biology, […]
This was originally posted at: “Postpublication peer review on social media is like the mosh pit at a punk rock conference. It’s fast, uncoordinated, a lot less subtle, more in your face, and involves a few more risks.’ Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific legitimacy – it is the process where research is analysed […]
Inspired by Martin Eve, I decided to make a documentation of academic-related stuff I’ve achieved in 2013. The last year was mostly occupado by the first year of my PhD, but other academic-ish stuff too as complimentary activities to research. This is kinda like a personal diary of ‘achievements’, as well as a documentation of […]
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 […]