Category Archives: Information

Dance in order to explain your research? Yes, why not?

Here’s an idea:  See if your English instructor or your Speech / Communications instructor would allow you to dance in order to explain your research.

You see the American Association for the Advancement of Science has put on the third annual Dance Your Ph.D. competition wherein a Ph.D thesis is explained with a dance routine.

Here is one of the finalists.   Enjoy.

Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX by Maureen McKeague

(found via Boing Boing)

The risks of using Wikipedia as a source

If you use Wikipedia, please be aware that there are risks to using it as a source (not even counting the risk of upsetting your teacher, who requested that you use it sparingly, if you use it at all).

So says science Journalist Steve Silberman, by way of  Rafe Colburn of r3c.org

If you’re curious about the historical context for the TV series The Pillars of the Earth, Wikipedia is an outstanding resource. On the other hand, if you’re writing a news story about outbreaks of infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals, you shouldn’t rely on what you read in Wikipedia. Science journalist Steve Silberman writes about how spurious information sourced from Wikipedia is pervasive in stories about acinetobacter, and why that bad information could cost people their lives.

One Wikipedia entry = 12 print books. Wow.

James Bridle, of booktwo.org, writes about how one entry in Wikipedia – The Iraq War – turned into a multi-volume set, 12 books in all.  Basically, Mr Bridle, took all the edits to that one entry, made between Dec. 2004 and Nov 2009 and turned them into a 12-volume look into ‘flow of history,’ Wikipedia-style

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article,  during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

It is a rather fascinating concept and posting.  Read it at booktwo.org.  See his presentation on Slideshare.  Or listen to his presentation at Huffduffer [he presented at dContruct 2010].