Random demographic graphics

I've just installed Office 2008 on my Mac in the hopes that it would make it easier for me to read files that people send me from PCs at work. So far, I've discovered that the Mac and PC interfaces are not at all the same, which explains why my students have been so frustrated when they've tried to do assignments on their home computers.

I'm going to get familiar with Excel by graphing the demographic data from the closed survey on my sidebar. Warning: includes default color schemes and gratuitous 3D pie charts.



Two-thirds of my readers are younger than me. That doesn't surprise me, but it means that I can't make Usenet jokes and expect people to get them. It also may explain this:



Well, not exactly. It looks like the quadrant compass is going the way of Usenet and geosynclinal theory. We're gradually replacing our quadrant compasses as they break... but I'm still going to make all my students convert all their measurements back and forth, because I'm a Big Meanie.

(Also, doesn't that graph look like it ought to have "One ring to rule them all..." inscribed on it?)

The next two graphs should have an axis labeled "number of responses" - I thought the total number of each of these was more interesting than the percent.

I'm not sure if "employment" is the right title for this graph. (I'm also not sure how many of the grad students also described themselves as employed in academia.)

Edit - By the way, "pre-college" is short for "pre-college educator" here. I was curious how many people were K-12 (or earlier) teachers, especially because Earth Science isn't taught in high school in many states (including Texas and California).

And finally, I have no idea why this bar graph insists on putting "other background" on top of "geoscientist." Perhaps it knows that geoscientists are down to earth, or something lame like that.



I know that this pair of questions left out some possibilities. (People who became geoscientists after a background in something else; people who majored in geology but got a job doing something different.)

And now I can delete those surveys from the side of this blog.

Geoblogger meet-up at AGU?

Lee Allison asked if there is going to be a geoblogger meet-up at AGU. I know that Christie and Brian are going to be there, and I think Ron is organizing a session and Julian submitted an abstract. And Andrew is local to the Bay Area. (There are also some pseudonymous bloggers who have mentioned being there. I'm not leaving you out on purpose - I'm just letting you choose what info you want the world to know.) I'm sure I'm leaving other people out, too.

I'm arriving Tuesday afternoon and leaving Thursday afternoon (and I really want to catch up with some of my former students!), so I don't have a lot of flexibility. But would anyone be interested in meeting for dinner on Wednesday night?

Googling for reliable geoscience sites

Chris Rowan is better at Googling than I am. He know how to customize Google searches so they prioritize sites that he considers reliable, and he knows how to share his search engine with the world.

He's looking for suggestions for useful and reliable sites. (Think USGS-level reliability.) If you know of some that he's forgotten, please suggest them to him.

Earth Science Week: photo, essay, and art contests for all

Thanks to Silver Fox and Geology Joe for reminding me that Earth Science Week starts today. The theme is "No Child Left Inside," so the best way to celebrate would be to take a kid outside (or to donate to one of the classrooms from Maria's Donors Choose challenge). But there are other possibilities, as well.

For kids, there are two contests:

For US kids in kindergarten* - fifth grade, there's an art contest. The kids need to create some kind of visual art work portraying themselves as scientists studying the Earth.

For US kids in sixth - ninth grade, there's an essay contest on "Earth Connections." Contestants should submit an essay about how Earth's natural processes are connected to one another in the place where they live.

And grown-ups can play, too. (That is, if they haven't broken their cameras.)

United States residents of all ages can submit photos to the contest on "Earth Science Beyond Your Front Door". And no matter where in the world you live, you can submit photos for the contest on "Exploring Earth Science Around the World". From skimming the contest descriptions, I think the focus is on people exploring the Earth, rather than on the Earth alone.

The deadline for all the contests is Friday, October 17. (That would be nineteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, if you're counting.) Check the official Earth Science Week web page for the details about all of the contests.

*I tried to get my son to draw a picture for this contest. (He's been drawing some wonderful volcanoes lately in his school writing notebook.) Today, however, he said he only wanted to draw a picture of himself as a football player.

Blogging (post) GSA: who reads blogs?

I'm back from GSA (after a Thursday afternoon flight from Houston to Denver, on which the flight attendants probably could have gotten a lot of laughs by asking "what's in this bag, rocks?"). I'm going to try to write some more about some of the science and education sessions (including one that I wished I had seen yesterday morning, on ultra-high-pressure metamorphism) later, but this morning, I'm going to navel-gaze.

Last year, a couple of people I knew from grad school mentioned that they had run across my blog, but I didn't talk about it with most people. But this year, I think a lot of people in my age range knew that I blog. And it didn't seem something to hide or fret about. (In fact, one of my friends introduced her grad students to me because they read my blog. *waves* You're doing really cool stuff!) And at a discussion of issues for mid-career faculty members, I realized that my blog helps keep science and teaching fresh for me, at a stage in my career where I could easily stagnate.

But I also hesitated to talk about my blog to people I considered mentors of various sorts. Grad committee members, faculty at my previous institutions, a friend who is running an NSF program... I didn't talk about the blog to them. And I wondered why. Perhaps I'm still nervous about being judged. But perhaps it was my perception that there's something generational going on. My friends have used e-mail since grad school (or before), and have had web pages since they got their first teaching positions. Some have their own Facebook pages. The internet is full of many ways to communicate, some useful for some things, some useful for others, and it's not that big of a deal to use it or not. But I still expect other people to say "get off the internet and get back to real work!"

But I may be projecting my expectations rather than observing what other people think. So I've added a poll to the sidebar, to get some sense of who reads this blog. I don't collect any kind of statistics about how many people read - I know Callan and others do, but I don't. And I know Brian asked a similar question (in his old blog last year?). But I'm curious who you all are.

(And as a total aside, I ran into Zoltan Sylvester while getting coffee yesterday morning. We each had the last talk scheduled in our respective sessions, but the rooms were cold and the morning was long. We closed down the conference. Good to meet you, Zoltan!)

Edit: Apologies to the undergrads (and pre-college students) who got left out of the poll. I... well, I hadn't had coffee yet, and somehow thought that undergrads would be obvious from other info.

Don't leave those kids inside...

"No Child Left Inside" is the theme of this year's Earth Science Week, October 12-18. Our geology club is going to work with the after-school program at a local elementary school to do something on Friday, October 17 (the 19th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). On Fridays, the local schools let kids out at 1:30 pm, and parents usually don't get home early, so lots of kids stay at Kid Kamp. Seems like a perfect fit for a rock scavenger hunt. (Or maybe we'll bring the shaking tables down and let the elementary kids build houses of sugar cubes, then knock them down.) The classroom activities here include some fun-sounding ideas. And there are lots of activities at Earth Learning Ideas, too (and on their blog, as well).

And to keep the earth sciences in the classroom during other weeks of the year, as well, Maria has picked out lots of great projects to be funded by the Donors Choose organization.

So let's get those kids dirty.

Open Lab 2008 is taking submissions

For the past two years, a volunteer group of bloggers has been publishing an anthology of great science blog posts, and publishing it in a dead-tree edition. (Yes, I realize there's something odd about that.) They're looking for posts now:



The call for posts is here.

Bora at A Blog Around the Clock has a list of current submissions. I don't see anything from the geoblogosphere yet. Last year, Chris Rowan and I had posts included in the anthology. The geoblogosphere has grown immensely in the meantime - I hope that many of you will submit your posts (or posts you loved reading) for this year's collection.

Happy blogiversary to me

I started posting to this blog a year ago today. I guess that makes this a time for reminiscing or something, so I'll give it a try.

I like the geoblogosphere. It can be a little like being at a conference without having to drive or fly. There are the discussions about current research. There are the discussions about world events (especially geologic events), and about extraterrestrial events. There are great pictures. There's a little catching up with people. There's talk about life as a scientist, about kids and theses and dissertations and jobs and why geology doesn't get any respect from the other sciences, even in a world with earthquakes and volcanoes and landslide dams threatening collapse. No beer, and none of that cold scared feeling in the gut before giving a talk, but it's still both social and scientific.

For me, personally, blogging has helped me think about teaching, both about pedagogy and about content. It's given me a reason to dig through both old and new papers (even if I rarely blog about them). It's given me ideas to use in classes - "Where on Google Earth" might return when I teach the intro class again in the fall. It hasn't given me new research ideas, but the act of writing has made my writing faster, I think, when I've got things that need to get done. (In the three work days that I had last week, I wrote a GSA abstract and a grant proposal. I don't normally work that fast. But I've found it's a lot easier to write short proposals, at least, when I've been writing and thinking a lot.) Nobody at work knows that I blog, but when they find out (and they will, eventually), I'm not going to be embarrassed about it.

So I'll keep doing it. I've thought about moving to Wordpress (because it seemed like such a good idea when Brian did it last fall), but I'm not going to do it now. (I haven't figured out how to add a picture to my header here, and I'm trying to sell a house. Maybe I'll do it next year.)

Why so personal?

I had a conversation today with David Brown, who's writing an article about geoblogging for the AAPG Explorer. He asked one question that I really didn't know how to answer: why is my blogging so personal?

I've been thinking about it for the rest of the day, and I think there are a couple answers. The first goes back to the reasons why I blog. Geologists, like other scientists, do their professional communicating using strict (but often unwritten) rules. Scientific writing is impersonal, for good reason: the point is to talk about the observations, the models, the reasons why one explanation is better than the other. The ideas should hold up under examination by many other people. And a scientist should be able to step back from her own pet hypothesis and conclude that she was wrong, if that's what the evidence says. Good science should be free of ego and bias.

But that's an almost inhuman ideal. And, well, it may be a useful process, but it's not what makes me keep working in this field. I do geology because it's beautiful. I love being outside, scrambling through brush, and then looking up and seeing the mountain across the valley, or the potholes in a streambed, and feeling as though the breath has just been knocked out of me. I'm fascinated by the stories hidden in the textures of metamorphic rocks. I like to spin the stage on a petrographic microscope and watch the pretty colors. (Come on. I can't be the only person who does this.) I like the twisted shapes of multiple crenulations seen in thin section, and the smoothness of slickenlines on a fault plane. And I like being confused: walking up to an outcrop and wondering what on earth could have made it like that, and does it really make sense given what everyone else has said about it.

Those aren't the kinds of things that go into a scientific paper. They keep me going through the research, but when the time comes to write a grant proposal or a journal article, I have to put them aside.

Five years ago, I had just been admitted to the hospital to have my son. I was luckier than most women in science: I had accumulated a great deal of experience before my mid-30's, enough so that I got tenure while on maternity leave. If I hadn't, having a baby would have knocked me out of science.* I'm not as strong and determined and efficient as most of the women-in-science bloggers. I slacked off, let the fieldwork slide, didn't publish. Now, I'm working my way back. But I can't do it by simply sitting down and writing an impersonal article. I need to be driven by the sense of wonder, as well.

I started blogging as an outlet for that part of me: the part that finds geology beautiful.

And there's another thing. Being a geologist means that I have an intense sense of place. I'm not from around here, but I live here, and do research here. So I blog about plants, rivers, ice crystals, and whatever else I see, because blogging helps me pay attention to where I am.

(Of course, I may write very personal-sounding posts simply because I'm not a good journalist, and I can't think up universal hooks. So I'm left telling personal stories. Perhaps.)

* You know, it struck me that this could be used as fodder for all those people who think that women shouldn't be hired as doctors or scientists or whatever, because they'll just go and have babies and stop being productive. So, a little more detail about my situation five years ago: I was denied tenure at my first job, in December of 1999. It was like getting dumped, after trying for seven years to become the person that my old school expected me to be. So I was a bit commitment-shy in the first years of my new job: I didn't want to become too attached to the place before I knew that it wouldn't dump me, as well. That meant that I decided I wouldn't start a new research project in a new field area until after I had tenure. And by that time, I had a baby. So, here I am.

scientiae-carnival

Is it unethical to blog about peer-reviewed research?

Chris Rowan has already posted about the commentary in Nature Geoscience from Myles Allen, which includes this argument for comment-and-reply within journals, rather than discussion in the blogosphere:

We just need to remember the basic courtesies that our doctoral supervisors took for granted: criticism of peer-reviewed results belongs in the peer-reviewed literature.

Allen responded to Chris's post, and raised some interesting points about problems with blogging.

But the idea we should post our personal views on the internet and leave them there to be picked up and twisted who-knows-how, without subjecting them to any form of review before doing so, is a new one, and not good for science. I don't have a problem with blogging per se, if bloggers were to comply with the old-fashioned courtesy of checking with the authors that they have understood a paper correctly before criticizing it in public.

A little background to Allen's criticism, for people who don't have access to Nature Geoscience: he was a co-author of a paper discussed on RealClimate, and the discussion misinterpreted their work. Over a year later, the story came back again, and

two journalists picked up the story and, led on by what they had found in the blogosphere, accused us of distorting our results for the sake of publicity.

That sounds like an unpleasant experience.

Blogging is an odd activity. Like much conversation on the internet, it feels like talking to oneself. And the writer alone controls what is said: there is no other editor or reviewer. But the conversations are open to the entire world, and are accessible long after the conversations are past.

So what kind of responsibility do we have to get things right?

It's a tough question. You know, I teach about some of the papers that I blog about. And I teach undergraduates, which means that my explanations of methods and background are The Last Word about them. And I'm not perfect, not by any means. I've taught probably 150 students about fracture mechanics - and I'm a specialist in ductilely squashed rocks; everything I know about cracks comes from papers (and smashing things with a rock hammer). I probably miss important points in about half the things that I teach. Yet I don't e-mail the authors of papers, unless they are people I know, or unless an undergrad research student wants to work with their results. I'm not sure they would want me to e-mail them.

Should blogging be different from teaching undergraduates? If so, why? Because blogs can be read by anyone? (Hi, Mom!) Because there aren't many blogs about, say, structural geology, so I have a greater responsibility to act as a reliable authority? Because blog posts can be recalled more easily than comments made in a lecture to sleep-deprived undergrads?

Until this discussion, I had figured that published work was fair game for discussion in any forum, as long as the work was appropriately cited. It's ok to adapt methods, it's ok to use ideas to explain your own work, and it's ok to criticize - in class, in a discussion and reply, in another paper... or in a blog.

I'm not sure that the peer-review system ensures that published work is interpreted correctly (or as the authors would like). Reviews of new papers focus on the new work: are the methods appropriate? Do the conclusions follow from the results? A reviewer has the opportunity to correct an author, but most of the cited authors aren't reviewers. (Thank goodness. The review process requires a lot of unthanked volunteer work as it is.)

That's not Allen's point, though. Allen is talking, I believe, about the comments-and-replies. I don't know what goes on in that editorial process. Are there reviewers, besides the journal editor? And if there aren't, is a comment essentially reviewed by the original authors who are given the opportunity to respond? (This does make the process more fair to the original authors, who probably don't google their own names daily, looking for blog posts about their work.)

Do bloggers have a similar responsibility, to contact authors and let them comment?

And what happens when news reports and press releases have misleading headlines that are not supported by the journal articles? Are those appropriate blogging fodder?

Two posts I don't need to write

Maria at Green Gabbro writes about geology terms that should be brought back from the dead. (That means I don't need to write a sequel to my post about retiring outmoded terms. Plus she knows some really good words. I'm going to have to find a way to use tiphon and gnamma in conversation this week.)

And Chris at Highly Allochthonous writes about a discussion of science blogging in this month's Nature Geoscience (which, amusingly enough, also featured letters from Julia and me that were, at least in my case, requested by the editor after he read my blog). One of the opinion pieces is by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, and argues for the usefulness of blogging. The other one - the one that made me want to blog - was by Myles Allen, who argues that discussions of the scientific literature belong in comments and replies. (I might still have to write about this, from the perspective of a teacher... but Chris has some interesting things to say, so maybe I'll just stick to commenting there.)

(Half of) 2007 in retrospect

I wasn't going to do the meme in which we post the first sentence of the first post of each month. I only started blogging in June, after all. But it does seem like a good way to reflect about the year, so here it is:

• June: NPR has had this series, off and on, in which listeners record interesting sounds and then explain them on the air. (The Sound of Mylonites)


• July: As students walked into my Earth Systems Science class on the first day of fall semester, 2005, they saw a satellite image I had just grabbed from NOAA’s website: Hurricane Katrina, aimed straight at New Orleans. (book rec: Storm World by Chris Mooney)


• August: Chris Rowan had a very thought-provoking post a couple days ago based on a suggestion by Propter Doc: that all scientific journal articles should include (possibly on the web, rather than in a print version) a lay statement written by the authors of the journal article. (summaries for non-scientists: what should they contain?)


• September: I grew up on the second-most-polluted lake in the state of Maine. (of lakes and rocks (or why I do what I do))


• October: I found the pink caldera on the China/North Korean border, so it's my turn to post something. (Where on (Google) Earth #56)


• November: I just got back from a two-day microprobe marathon - two days on what's essentially a scanning electron microscope that can do chemical analyses of very small crystals. (Teeny-tiny partial melt)


• December: My intro students turned in their papers for my new, kind-of-experimental, revised group project yesterday. (Teaching: a comment I like to hear)

I find the end of December an odd time for musing about endings and beginnings. The winter solstice makes me want to hibernate until the days get longer, and feels like a time for waiting, rather than a time for making changes. The equinoxes feel more like a time of change to me - the autumn equinox, in particular, feels like a time for new beginnings. (Maybe that's the result of the academic cycle, though, rather than the cycle of seasons.)

But today's the day that our year ends, so... patterns and resolutions:

• This blog has changed from me talking to myself about things I saw or things I read, to me talking to other people. It's nice to be part of a community, but I would like to go back to writing about odd observations more often.


• As the fall semester progressed, I talked about teaching more and more. Perhaps that's normal, given that I was teaching four courses and three labs.


• It's been a while since I've played Where on (Google) Earth.

• I can't decide which rules to follow for capitalizing post titles. GSA rules, in which only the first letter is capitalized? The rule of titles I learned as a kid, in which all nouns and verbs are capitalized? The Lazy Internet Rule, in which nothing is capitalized unless I want to draw attention to it? I can't figure out what looks best on the blog, and what looks best on the geoblogosphere widget that I haven't figured out how to install.
  

And in the next year:

• I want to do more blogging about peer-reviewed research. (Once a month seems like a good goal - it would make me set aside time to read articles, even during the busy time of the semester.) I love teaching, but it's easy to miss what's new in a discipline when I've got so many classes, and I don't want to become one of those greying professors whose classes forever reflect the ideas that were current when they were in graduate school.


• I'm also going to try to post some kind of photo every month, and talk about what I see. I've got a bunch of digital photos that I took last year, but never got around to blogging about them - perhaps they can fill the time until I can go outside. (Or I can post pictures of deformation in Silly Putty or chocolate chip cookies, for that matter.)


• And there are things that I started talking about last year - things that need finishing. I haven't looked at the pre- and post-tests I gave before showing An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, so I don't know whether the movie was useful at all.

The Open Lab is a bit short on earth science posts

I wish I could remember the times this past week when I've seen discussion of the sciences in general, and a list of what's included... and geology wasn't there. I'm hardly the first geo-blogger to notice and comment. But today I noticed a lack someplace else: The Open Laboratory, the science blogging anthology.

There were posts by geoscientists. There were climate and paleontology posts. There were oceanography posts. There were creation-science-debunking posts.

But geology? Nothing.

When I saw that, I nominated one post, but this is a crazy week for me, and I don't have time to find all the great posts I've read in the geoblogosphere in the past six months. And I'm a newcomer, too - I suspect there were a lot of great posts written before I started actively reading.

So help me out here, and let's keep ourselves from being so invisible.

Maybe if the blogosphere acknowledges that geology exists, schoolkids in California and Texas can start studying the earth sciences, too.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

edit: I remembered one of the places where I saw geology left out of a list: at Wikipedia, in its entry on "special sciences" (as philosophers apparently call them; I had never heard the term before).

Here's the relevant text:

The special sciences are those sciences other than physics that are sometimes thought to be reducible to physics, or to stand in some similar relation of dependence to physics as the "fundamental" science. The usual list includes chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and many others.

Perhaps we should be proud that geology isn't on the list - maybe that means we rank above physics in the philosophers' hierarchy. But I suspect that geology isn't on the list because the philosophers don't even think about it existing, or maybe consider it a form of stamp-collecting.