Lisa Johnson, CBC reporter moderated the event and was impressed by the storytelling abilities of the “scientists” tonight. The question and answer period was engaging and involved showing how people are genuinely interested in Canada’s north and the issue of climate change.

Russel Horwitz raised the idea that climate change is a tragedy of the commons. The issue is much more complex than simply taking the bus over taking a car. Audience members ask, so what can we do to mitigate climate change? What do we tell other developing countries, like China and India about climate change?

Scientists respond, unfortunately Canada is a first world country with a third world economy. But we need to lead by example.

The session came to an end at 9pm, but many stayed and mingled.

Data shows a trend. Climate change is real.

We partnered with Science World to bring you local scientists and researchers discussing how research up north tells us about the impact it has on us down “south”.

]]> http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/10/23/recap-changing-landscape-science-in-canadas-north-1020/feed/ 0 http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/09/23/recap-writing-for-action-920/ http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/09/23/recap-writing-for-action-920/#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:40:52 +0000 Sarah Chow http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/?p=205 After a summer hiatus, we are back with our fourth ScienceOnlineVancouver event. In spirit of the start of the school semester, we thought, why not kick off the event with a basic how-to communicate science effectively.

We asked Andy Torr, a communications strategist in the Office of Vice President of Research at UBC to share his knowledge and tools on communicating science. He also did a fantastic talk on the same topic at the AAAS talk. It so well received, at the end, audience members were lined up just to talk to Andy. Many people could not attend his session as it was at 8:00 am, so we thought, why not have him present again and give those who couldn’t make it a chance to check it out.

And many did. We had over 40 people attend. This time we held the event in a more comfortable and intimate setting, the Exploration Lab at Science World. And we had munchies and BEvERages thanks to FigShare!

Andy gave us many tools to create a clear message among science chaos, as well as how to create a why. Why do you do what you do?

Below are the list of resources and links he used.

• Escape from the Ivory Tower by Nancy Baron
• PhD Comics Science News Cycle
• Gunning Fog Index
• Golden Circle
• Resonate by Nancy Duarte

The event was a great way to kick off the #ScioVan season. Tell us what you think of the event and what topics you would like to see us cover in the comment section below. Or tweet us @ScioVan. We always welcome feedback.

Thanks again to FigShare for the munchies and BEvERages, Science World for the venue, Andy Torr for the WONDERFUL talk, and all of you who attended, both in person and online. See you all next month!

If you missed it, here is the archived livestream. We’ll post the slides soon.

And lots of great chatter online:

We also changed our hashtag from #sovan to #sciovan, because things were starting to get messy.

We are taking a break for the month of July and August, but we have a feeling some impromptu #ScioVan Tweetups may arise during these months. We will be back in full force come September.

On a sadder note, our dear co-organizer Peter Newbury @polarisdotca as accepted a position as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching Development University of California, San Diego (UCSD). We wish him the best of luck and hopefully see a ScienceOnlineSanDiego pop up.

If you weren’t able to make our Naked Science event, we’ve provided the livestream video and the Storify of online interactions for you. If we forgot anything, please let us know in the comments.

]]> http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/06/21/recap-naked-science-612-event/feed/ 1 http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/05/29/science-online-with-andy-hegle/ http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/blog/2012/05/29/science-online-with-andy-hegle/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 21:44:12 +0000 Sarah Chow http://scienceonlinevancouver.com/?p=167 Each month, SoVan will feature a member of the ScienceOnlineVancouver community. This month we have Andy Hegle, winner of the NASA backpack from the first SoVan event, where do you get your science?

Could you tell us about yourself. Where are you from?

I’m originally from Michigan, and received both my BS and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Go Blue!

What is taking up most of your time and passion these days?

Right now I’m focused on my current research project. I study tiny molecular machines called HCN channels, or “pacemaker” channels, which are the little bioelectric switches that help keep your heart beating, among other things. I use fruit flies as a model system to figure out how these channels work in the nervous system, and it turns out they’re pretty important, because they don’t survive to adulthood without them. I’m also quite involved with the UBC Postdoc Association, which promotes professional development workshops, advocates for postdoctoral affairs and hosts social functions for the ~800 postdocs at UBC.

In 10 years what do you picture yourself doing?

That’s a good question! I’m keeping my options open, but am currently exploring opportunities in the biotech industry.

Do you use social media? ie twitter, G+, facebook? Why/Why not? Do you think having an online presence a positive thing, maybe necessary?

Actually, I don’t really. I have a LinkedIn profile, and I use Reddit, but I’m not on Facebook, G+, or Twitter. I’m a strong proponent of online privacy, and so far I’ve not been impressed by the way Facebook, in particular, misuses people’s personal data. This is something that I could go on at length about, but suffice to say I’m waiting to see what will happen in the next few years as the technology evolves.

Do you consider yourself a creator, communicator, consumer or a mixture? Why?

I’d say I’m a mixture of all three. I’m a scientist, so I could call myself a creator, but science by its very nature also needs to be communicated well to other scientists and to the public. If no one knows what you’ve discovered, then what’s the point? So I’m a communicator as well, although to a lesser degree than some of the people reading this, I’m sure. Over all though, I’d honestly have to say I’m a consumer. I’m hugely interested in many disparate areas of science that have nothing to do with my field, so you’ll find me constantly reading about physics, astronomy, math, technology, etc.

What does being part of the ScienceOnline community mean to you?

It gives me a chance to meet a lot of great people who bridge the creator/communicator/consumer boundaries, and getting these different perspectives is really important to me. I think there are too many science “creators” who are either unable to communicate or are simply uninterested in how the public views what they do. We’re lucky to be living in an era of unprecedented access to information, but this has also allowed misinformation to flourish like never before. It’s essential that those who do science for a living are, at the very least, engaged with those who translate their findings to the public. It’s also just a lot of fun to be involved.

Where do you get/source your science?

Professionally, I go directly to the primary literature and to review articles, usually using a portal like PubMed. For science news in general, I use a combination of trusted blogs, newspapers and news aggregates, and the online editions of science journals. I’ve also found that Wikipedia has gotten better and better as a starting point for learning about scientific concepts, and the embedded links to related articles and outside references makes it really easy to get immersed in any number of fascinating topics.

What are you going to do with your NASA Backpack?

It’ll definitely come in handy when I go to the beach. Or to space.

Thanks Andy for the taking the time to chat with SoVan. See you next month!

If you weren’t able to make it, we’ve provided the livestream video and the Storify of online interactions for you. If we forgot anything, please let us know in the comments!

Livestream:

Storify

Please become a member of ScienceOnlineVancouver to participate

Dear Mom, Please Sign The Petition. #OAMonday

Inspired by Stuart Shieber’s open letter to his family and friends asking them to sign the access2research petition, here is the email I just sent to mine.  Please use bits if you’d like.  I dislike spamming people, but y’know sometimes people who love you want to help you, and it is your job to show them how.

Furthermore, this isn’t just a researcher issue.  It is an everyone issue.  #ResearchAccessFTW

Hi family and friends,

I’m emailing to ask you to help with my research. It’ll take about 5 minutes.

Specifically, I’m asking you to sign a petition that states that research paid for by US taxpayer dollars should be available for free to US taxpayers (and others!) on the internet. It’ll help you, and it’ll help my research.

Short version: sign petition here: http://access2research.org/Petition
Cool version: watch this video: http://vimeo.com/42549003
Long version:

Right now a research article costs more than a book! About $30. Only people with university affiliations have broad access… and then only to the journals their libraries subscribe to. The journals are extraordinarily (and unnecessarily) expensive. High school teachers, enthusiastic 16 year olds, journalists, government officials, scientists in industry, proud scientist-parents-and-siblings… all of them pay for research but can’t read it without paying again.

This impacts you because you can’t easily read the research you pay for. It impacts me because there is a lot I can’t read… and even more that my computer can’t read because of restrictive subscription terms (see recent press coverage of my struggles here and here). This wastes time and results in worse science.

The biggest medical funder in the US, the NIH, started hosting drafts of research articles for free a few years ago, as a condition of its research funding. This has been a huge win, with no meaningful financial downsides to anyone. The goal is to expand this program to all US government funders.

You can help: sign this petition, ideally in the next few days. If we get 25k signatures in the next month the issue will be placed in Obama’s office for integration into policy. !!!. This is HUGE.

(You can sign whether US or Canadian citizen! Canadians would get access to the US research too… and it would help convince the Canadian government to adopt similar rules. You will have to create an account with whitehouse.gov to sign.)

Thanks very much for reading this, and please spread the word. Feel free to write to me whenever you have causes that keep *you* up at night :)

 

Thank you Fred Bremmer for also posting his photos.

If you have other photos to share please send them to us and we can post it our Flickr page.

If you have another topic to suggest, please leave it in the comments or contact us via email, facebook, twitter…

If you weren’t able to make it, we’ve provided the video, presentations, and the Storify of online interactions for you.

Livestream video

Note: the presentations didn’t show up well in the video so we’ve embedded them below.

Peter Newbury’s introduction

Rosie Redfield’s presentation: Rosie Redfield did a 5 minute review of the #arseniclife events. There are 20 slides in 5 minutes, with each slide advancing automatically after 15 seconds.

Lisa Johnson’s short video clip

See how the event unfolded on Storify This is a collection of the online discussions that happened around the event. We’ve included the first page here but there was lots of discussion so you might want to go directly to the Storify site.