This site is probably going away soon. Maybe. To be replaced, or rather subsumed, by something else. Details will be posted as they become available.

This has to exist already—an app that lets you read literature as a social activity. I am imagining an AP English classroom where the students all have tablets. The teacher enters a code and unlocks the semester’s reading list. The students then begin to competitively read against/with each other, in a networked fashion, unlocking achievements as they make their way through the text. There are waypoints/savepoints where the students are quizzed on their comprehension before being allowed to proceed. It could either be a first-person-reader or the students could form study groups/teams. There could be some Survivor-style intrigue and machinations built into it—reading as a RPG experience—with opportunities for co-op or solo. There would be a dashboard/leaderboard that would show the stats of the class’ progress. Students could create video essays and post them to the group or they could type it out the old-fashioned way. Achievements might unlock bonus content or give the winner special privileges.

Cheating would be an issue. And not every student would want to play or necessarily benefit from this kind of interaction.

It’s weird to think of reading as a social activity instead of something private.

I am heading up north to the Science Online 2011 conference. I will be on two panels. I’ll have more to post about those in the next few days, but in the meantime, the program listings are below. I am hoping for a good conference, and my thanks go out to Anton, Bora and my co-panelist for allowing me to participate again. These session will not be officially streamed by the conference, but I will try to get a signal of my own out, or at least record them.

• Saturday, January 15th: 10:15-11:15am, Room A
  Technology and the Wilderness – Miriam Goldstein, Jason Robertshaw, Danielle Lee and Karen James
   
  Technology offers unparalleled opportunity for outdoor education – yet it is viewed as a cause of “Nature Deficit Disorder.” But little glowy screens can be amazing educational tools. Potential directions include tools (for example: a citizen science iPhone app from Mote Marine Laboratory), networking (e.g., Outdoor Afro bringing people of color outdoors together), and exploration (e.g., following up on the Blogging From the Field/Trash Gyre sessions from past years, citizen science, teenagers blogging their discoveries).
  Hashtags: #techwild
   
• Saturday, January 15th: 3:15pm-4:15pm, Room A
  Institutional Blogging: Online outreach for science, conservation, education and government organizations – Jeff Ives, Jason Robertshaw, Allie Wilkinson and Stephanie Levi
   
  Blogs, podcasts and social media are a key outreach tool for most non-profit science, conservation, educational and governmental organizations. Building those assets can be challenging due to institutional roadblocks, time constraints and limited budgets. Come join the discussion about the difficulties, strategies and rewards of integrating new media into an institution, including a science outreach initiative focused on under-represented and low income students.
  Hashtags: #inblogging

The December edition of the Carnival of the Blue is out at Dr. Alistar Dove’s Deep Type Flow. Al is an Australian marine biologist living in the United States, where he is currently Senior Scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.

Also, signups for 2011 hosting slots are now open over at the Carnival of the Blue main site. I also completed a set of Guidelines of the Blue, which are hints for hosting and posting in the best monthly ocean roundup.

A weekly roundup of cephalopod-related links that have come across my desk. This edition of This Week in Cephalopods is triple stuffed. There’s three weeks worth of cephalopod goodness accumulated here on account of my MacBook losing its mind, which kept me from updating on schedule.

Cephalo—Couture

Cephalopods in art, fashion, writing and culture.

• BibliOdyssey: Mollusca. BiblioOdessey features Visual Materia Obscura and eclectic bookart of yesteryear. This post has plates out of ‘Molluscs and Shells’ (1852-1856) from noted malacologist Augustus Addison Gould.
• Sleeping with the Fishes: Science in Comics: the Fantastic Four on Octopus Intelligence.
• Stomp Tokyo: Octaman (1971) – The Bad Movie Report. So bad it’s bad.
• Indie Squid Kid: T-shirt Tuesday: “Hello Squid” from TopatoCo.
• Pulp Archive: Analog October 1965.
• Brandi Milne’s Etsy shop: Let’s Eat Cake—15″ MacBook Pro GelaSkins. Octopus art for your laptop top.
• Metafilter: HP Lovecraft Creature Lab. Tentacular discussion and links to Rhode Island School of Design challenge to “Create a creature based upon a non-humanoid critter from H.P. Lovecraft’s literature.”

Education

• NEOSEC: Professional Development Workshop on Ocean Sounds. A professional workshop for teachers on Monday, December 13, 2010, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic. It will include a discussion by T. Aran Mooney on “How squids sense sound: can they hear the predators coming?”

Biology

• Cephalove: V. fisheri and the squid that love them. Mike Lisieski continues his look at squid-bacteria symbiosis and bioluminenscences. He also has a homologous post called The week in cephalopod videos, which demonstrates how ceph blogs can converge on similar content using slightly different features. Awesome.
• Chicago Journals – Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Protein Synthesis, Degradation, and Retention: Mechanisms of Indeterminate Growth in Cephalopods
• Harvard Gazette: Thinking like an octopus.

Fossils

• TONMO: More Lebanese soft bodies, with a related discussion on preservation of cephalopod fossil DNA here.
• Smithsonian—Dinosaur Tracking: A Dinosaur in an Italian Church?. Nice post by Brian Switek (@laelaps) that merges religion, paleontology and cephalopods.

Flickr

• Jason Robertshaw: Octopot. The black and white picture above is of a pottery piece that my aunt made. It was part of the annual Art Harvest at the Dunedin Fine Art Center. Available for purchase. DM me for details.
• Philip Woodward: Kites_Over_Kittty Hawk. Tip of the tentacle to Philip for notifying me about this pic. It is a much nicer cephalopod kite than mine. I am jealous.

Let me know if you have any suggestions or links you would like me to include next week. Thanks.

Looks like the logic board on my Mac died (again). Things are going to be quiet around here (again). Bugger.

BTW, posting from a phone is a PITA.

UPDATE: As of 11/24, my MBP is operational again and restored to it’s upright position. Posting should commence again on Friday (maybe sooner).

Click here to enlarge

Someday I’ll get around to writing a more formal response to Randy Olson’s book. Until then, this little visual parody must suffice. The premise is simple enough. In our world, Dr. O headed from east to west, traveling from the rational realms of the Ivory Tower to the artificial lands of Hollywood and lived to tell his tale. But what if the journey was reversed? What if, in a parallel world, there was a dramatist who went the opposite way, moving from fantasy and enchantment to integrity and substance? What kind of critique would a playwright-cum-scientist write for his colleagues left back on the stage? That’s the story I want to see.

For more background on this image, read Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. Also, bonus points if you spot the entirely too oblique reference to this Jainist allegory.

I’ve had this image on Flickr for a while now. I was prompted to post it here after reading Randy’s recent response to some of his critics. But more importantly, he also put up a public service announcement about the dangerous lionfish invasion in the Atlantic. It might amuse you too.

Collage of images from our day at Oscar Scherer State Park

Common Ground-Dove by dominic sherony, on Flickr

Did you know? Florida State Parks will waive their entrance fees on Thursday, 11/11/10 in honor of the Veterans Day holiday. [link]

A post of cephalopod-related links that have come across my desktop in the past week.

I am rolling out another new feature today called This Week in Cephalopods. Like yesterday’s Science Literacy roundup, this will be a weekly linkfest but one devoted to all things cephalopodal. I will post these on Fridays in an attempt to coincide with Paul Myers popular Friday Cephalopod series. I am hoping to make the end of the week as tentacular as possible. Of course, if you need a daily fix, I recommend joining the TONMO forums, a website where every day is Cephalopod Appreciation Day.

• Cephalove follows up on his Circus of the Spineless entry with a photo spread of the Bobtail Squid. He also has an extensive post about Enrichment in Captive Cephalopods, well worth a read for anyone interested in keeping octopuses in aquariums.
• Indie Squid Kid made an Octopus-o-Lantern for Halloween.
• Cephalopod Tea Party contributor . c h o k l i t . is expecting and she has the goods on Cephalopod Baby Goods.
• The Enchanted Garden has a follow up to her Cephalopod Day feature, this time with a look at the cephalopod art of Blissful Earth.
• The Internet Archive is a vast repository of historical and ephemeral content, including some on cephalopods. I came across two books over there:
  The anatomy of the common squid : Loligo pealii (1909) by Leonard Worcester Williams and The octopus : or, the “devil-fish” of fiction and of fact (1875) by Henry Lee. There are lots of public domain cephalopod illustrations included in those old sepia-toned pages.

That is all for this first post. Let me know if you have any suggestions or links you would like me to include next week. Thanks.

A weekly post of science literacy links that have come across my desktop.

This is something new that I am trying. Each Thursday I am going to aggregate some of the science literacy links that have come across my desktop and comment on some. There is likely to be a bias towards ocean science and new/social media linkages.

• Do Be Such An Editorialist

  Deep-Sea News has also launched a new weekly feature: From the Editor’s Desk. This first feature is from Dr. Craig McClain, who has some advice for journalist interacting with scientist. He also cites a figure of 28% for science literacy in the United States. That seems like a paltry figure, doesn’t it? Why isn’t it 100%? But if you read the linked article, you realize that this percentage is pretty high when compared to other countries. The reason given for this figure is undergraduate education—a year of undergrad general education is required at most US universities, but not so in Europe.

• Science 3-PO
  I signed up over at Science 3.0. I am still trying to figure out its function, but one post caught my attention: The ‘Top 10′ Most Prolific Science Bloggers, which features “a glut of interesting facts” including this one—the science world is blogging at a rate of around 85,000 blog posts a year. Sounds impressive. I hope people are reading all of them.
• Florida COSEE
  COSEE stands for Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence and they are various, semi-autonomous consortia of ocean research and education organizations. Their programs are funded mostly by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are fourteen centers representing different geographic areas and disciplines of studies. You would think that Florida would have a very robust presence in this scheme, but up until recently the COSEE initiative has flounder in this state. But now it looks like it’s found a new home at Indian River State College. Here’s hoping it goes swimmingly.
• 2010 Ocean Literacy Summit
  Speaking of ocean education, there is a conference next week that is all about it. The 2010 Ocean Literacy Summit is November 11-13 at the University of New Hampshire. Wish I could be there. Let me know if you will be attending.
• KidsReadScience and TeensReadScience

  I missed the memo on these competitions and now they are over. But the winners have been announced. It was a summer science-reading contests that challenged young people to read a work of non-fiction about science and then share a video about it with their peers. It might be around next year, so check out how it all went down this time: Kids Read Science and Teens Read Science Contest Winners.

That’s it for this first post. Let me know if you have any suggestions or links you would like me to include next week. Thanks.