Last night, I retweeted Genomic Repairman’s request for the twitterverse to sign up for an account at LabSpaces. He wanted users to join in on the discussions he was having in the group he created. We were greeted moments later by a tweet from DrugMonkey saying that THE Facebook for science is dead. Considering I just wrote a blog post on that exact topic, I found his tweet Ironic. The emphasis in that previous post being that there probably will never be ONE single social hub for scientists, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of multiple niche venues. Please excuse me while I get this out of my system:

(rant)What exactly is a FaceBook for science anyway? Is any site with a science spin, groups, a forum, and/or user profiles a “FaceBook.” If that’s the case, then there are hundreds of FaceBooks for science out there. I’d argue that the term is deprecated. Many sites employ social tool . . . More

I recently got an e-mail from David Bradley asking my opinion of Web 2.0 as it relates to science, where it’s heading, and how we can get scientists more involved in web 2.0 / data sharing / and the semantic web. I thought this would be a great topic for me to write a real post on since I’ve been involved in this field and trying to promote the ideas of web 2.0 in the sciences for the last 5 years.

For starters, I really have no idea what it will take to get scientists to be fully engaged with the on-line world. It's hard enough to get them engaged in the real world (I wish that was a joke…). I think for most scientists to get involved with a network, we're going to have to develop something that significantly increases scientific productivity, and I'm not talking just a free reference management site or being able to post lab retreat pictures to a profile. The last 4-5 years have showed us that scientists really are not interested in FaceBooks for science. The marginal success of ResearchGate, NatureNetwork, and LabSpaces can't be cited as triumphs because very little of wh . . . More

If you've read part one of the series, you must be giddy with anticipation and can't wait to find out what happened next!

It was finally time. Interview time.

The conference room was ready and awaited us. Six of us, and only one other girl. All in one room, all competing for the same job. Awkward..!

The first one to greet us was the HR guy. He explained how this was going to happen. We were to spend the first 45 minutes with him, talking about general company stuff, then we'd have 45 min with the CEO and founder, 45 min with the VP of engineering (complete with facility tour), and finally after that we get to begin the round of interviews. We would each have 5 one on one 30 minute interviews with engineers from the various departments. Yikkes!!!

I was scared, and I couldn't understand how no one else heard my heart pounding.. sounded like African drums.. I just wanted to get the interview part over with, so I could relax. But the one thing I learned, which I think is the most important thing to know when facing such interviews - Listen to what they say, these people will tell you exactly what they want to hear from you, they will tell you what they are looking for and what they expect you to be. I was so so happy to have heard th . . . More

Geeka's latest post about how she ended up a scientist inspired me to write this one.

It happened totally by accident. I wasn’t even looking for a job. I had just begun graduate school at the University of Florida, and was working on an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering. I was thrilled to have gotten a TAship and free tuition. I loved my advisor, he was my fav professor. And I was lucky enough to be a TA for the lab portion of a controls class he was teaching.

One night while home flipping the remote, I found myself watching the discovery channel. The Black Sky documentary about the Ansari X prize - The race to space - was on. That is totally MY kind of thing!

They showed SpaceShipOne and I got all excited. I told my roomies (jokingly.. kinda) that I’d do anything to work with those guys, never really expecting that to actually happen. I was so excited about the thought of commercial space taking shape that the next day in lab I told everyone about it, and how I was willing to wear a silly uniform too if that’s what it took to be part of something like that. They mocked me of . . . More

Net Neutrality is a very important issue.

If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“Internet neutrality is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates NO restrictions by Internet Service Providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.”

Net Neutrality is all about safeguarding your freedom to choose what sites you visit, without being restricted or hindered. You should have the ability to check out both CNN and MSN, you should be able to watch videos on YouTube, and Vimeo. That sounds fair.

But what if for instance, and this is JUST an example, CNN were to strike a deal with an internet service provider and say hey, if we pay you some extra money, would you provide higher bandwidth to CNN sites and lower bandwidth to our competitors . . . More

It's a bird! It's a plane!! No wait... It's a car!

No, I’m not kidding, it really is a car that flies. I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently this concept has been around for a few years now.

A group of MIT engineers got together and started a company called Terrafugia who manufactures this car-plane hybrid.

Cool name. As you probably guessed, it’s derived from the Latin words ‘Terra’ meaning Earth or ground, and ‘Fugia’ meaning escape.



What you’re looking at is the Terrafugia Transition. As the name suggests, it actually does transition between plane mode and car mode. In under 30 seconds no less! The transition itself is just the flip of a switch, which commands the wings to unfold and lock into place, or fold back up allowing you to drive away.

The car plane runs on regular gas, available at any gas station. How convenient! It even gets really good gas mileage in car mode, about 35 mpg. (Just like my pretty little civic did..)

This is a neat promo vid they made, kinda cheesy at times, but provides some good info.
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I spent some time last night and today fixing up some high resolution images to upload to a Zazzle store. The bloggers have been nagging me for a junk shop pretty much since they started, so I figured it was important to them. I don't know about you all, but I'm definitely getting a mug or two and at least one shirt. Stop by the store and see the rest of the junk!

Zazzle Store

The 3 designs available are shown below. I'll add more later. I'm sure some LabSpaces Memes will show up in there too!

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I was clued into a discussion earlier this morning by BiochemBelle about some misconceptions about what LabSpaces actually is. I will say that when I first read the comment by Ed Yong that LabSpaces is just another news aggregator (paraphrased) I was pretty upset. For one, the news (or "news") is only a small fraction of what LabSpaces is all about. If this was just a news site, I would have chosen to name the site "EurekAlert Science News Scraper". I thought that the vision of this site was covered pretty well in the "About" section, but Ed Yong is a busy guy and an all-star science writer/blogger, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here. What follows is a mock interview with Ed, I hope you enjoy.

Ed Yong: What's the deal with the Press Releases, . . . More