Conference and Blog contest

Dear Colleagues,

Apologies if you have already received notice of this opportunity.

It is my great pleasure to announce that the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCENT) in Durham will be funding 2 travel awards for Science Online 2010 in Research Triangle Park, NC. This annual (un)conference (http://www.scienceonline2010.com/index.php/wiki/) to "explore science on the web" takes place January 15-17 and is free to attend. Two awards for $750 each are meant to offset the costs of participating in the conference and are open to anyone from any country. To qualify, you need to write a blog post about evolutionary research that was published in 2009!

"To apply for an award, writers should submit a blog post that highlights current or emerging evolutionary research. In order to be valid, posts must deal with scientific results appearing in 2009. Posts should be 750‐1500 words, and must mention the NESCent contest."

For more details: http://deepseanews.com/2009/09/travel-awards-for-scienceonline-2010/

Please spread the word on your own blogs, tweets, webpages, news blurbs ,etc. It is great for such a prestigious organization to support online science communication in this way!

Mermaid's Tale Blog

I haven't been too active with reading or writing blogs lately - I've been traveling and trying to get some (publishable) analyses and writing done. But I just stumbled upon a blog I hadn't seen before by Ken Weiss and Anne Buchanan. Ken Weiss is an anthropologist at Penn State. He writes a lot about evolutionary concepts (some call it theory, but the math theorists don't like that). He had a published column for a while that I was a fan of - I even assign a few of them for my evolution class.

I am a fan because Professor Weiss is an ardent pluralist, comfortable with some ambiguity, and the fact that "dichotomies" are spectra, etc. This is a general philosophy I share, and use to make sense of the world and others' arguments.

So, I look forward to reading their blog, called the Mermaid's Tale (I'm not sure I'm fond of pun-ambiguity, but I guess it works in this case). It looks prolific, I don't think I'll be able to keep up.

Two New Blogs

Greetings from the frozen tundra. I've been in Milwaukee catching up with family and friends during the holidays. Visiting has been a full time job, and I've been online very little, but 2 new blogs have come to my attention, both by colleagues of mine:

First is "A Fish Eye View"

Next is "The EEB and Flow":

New Blog

I've noticed that a former student who worked in our lab has started a blog called Pleion. Bjørn enjoys discussing evolution and politics, cannibalism, and teasing Americans for not being able to pronounce "Bjørn Østman". He was made for blogging because he likes to be provocative. If you do go over there, ignore the post on predictions for Obama's first term, or else you'll get the wrong idea about him. If you do read that post, make sure to click on the links [English] to help clarify the sarcasm.